IJAESsince 2000 International Journal of Arabic-English Studies

A Pragmatic Study of the Speech Act of Threatening between Jordanian and American Speakers

Abstract

This paper investigates the speech act of making threats among native speakers of Jordanian Arabic (JA) and American English (AE). It explores new threat strategies used by Jordanian and American speakers and their pragmatic functions to construct an analytical framework for analyzing this act across cultures. The data for this study were collected using an open-ended questionnaire. This questionnaire consists of ten imaginary situations drawn from real life. The data were analyzed using chi-square tests (value <0.05) to determine whether the difference between the two groups for each threat strategy was statistically significant. The subjects of Jordanian Arabic included 40 male participants and 40 female participants from three universities in Irbid district while the American subjects included 15 male participants and 15 female participants from the University of Illinois in the United States. Five threat strategies were identified. Four of which were shared between the two groups: Telling Authority, Committing Harm, Introducing Options and Warning. However, Promise of Vague Consequence was confined to JA speakers. The study also found that JA speakers tended to be less direct than their AE counterparts.

Authors

Othman Al-Shboul

DOI

https://doi.org/10.33806/ijaes.v23i2.454

Keywords

American English, DCT, Jordanian Arabic, speech acts, threat strategies

Full Text :

ijaes.net/article/fulltext/view?volume=23&issue=2&id=5

References

Abd el-Jawad, Hassan R.S. (2000). ‘A linguistic and sociopragmatic and cultural study of swearing in Arabic’. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 13: 217-240. DOI:10.1080/07908310008666600. Austin, John, L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Al Shboul, Othman Khalid. (2020). ‘A pragmatic study of requests by males and females in online religious forums’. Studies in Linguistics and Literature, 4(3): 70-82. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22158/sll.v4n3p70. Barish, Steven Mark. (1991). Face threatening speech acts: Their implications for speech act theory. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Bataineh, Rula Fahmi and Ruba Fahmi Bataineh. (2008). ‘A cross-cultural comparison of apologies by native speakers of American English and Jordanian Arabic’. Journal of Pragmatics, 40: 792–821. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.01.003. Bauler, Clara. (2018). ‘Speech acts and cross-cultural pragmatics’. In Abigail G. Scheg (ed.), Applied Linguistics for Teachers of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners. IGI Global, 223-338. Western Governors University: USA. Beebe, Leslie M, Tomoko Takahashi and Robin Uliss-Weltz. (1990). ‘Pragmatic transfer in ESL refusals’. In Robin C Scarcella, Elaine Slosberg Andersen and Stephen Krashen (ed.), Developing Communicative Competence in a Second Language, 55-94. New York: Newbury House Publishers. Beller, Sieghard, Andrea Bender and Gregory Kuhnmunch. (2005). ‘Understanding conditional promises and threats’. Thinking & Reasoning, 11: 209-238. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546780442000141. Beller, Sieghard, Andrea Bender and Jie Song. (2009). ‘Conditional promises and threats in Germany, China and Tonga: Cognition and emotion’. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9: 115-139. DOI: 10.1163/156853709X414674 Benoit, Pamela L. (1983). ‘The use of threats in children's discourse’. Language & Speech, 26: 305-329. DOI: 10.1177/002383098302600401. Berk-Seligson, Susan and Mitchell A. Seligson. (2016). ‘Reported threats: the routinization of violence in Central America’. Pragmatics, 26(4): 583- 607. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.26.4.03ber. Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. (1978). ‘Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena’. In Esther N. Goody (ed.), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, 56- 289. Cambridge: CUP. Christensen, Tanya Karoli. (2017). ‘Indirect threats as an illegal speech act’. The sign of the V-papers in Honour of Sten Vikner, 113-130. doi:10.7146/aul.348.92. Hamdan, Hady J. and Radwan Mahadin. (2021). ‘Disagreement realization in Arabic: Evidence from Jordan’. Pragmatics and Society, 12 (3):349-372. Johnson, Danette Ifert, Micheal Rolff and Mellissa A Riffee. (2004). ‘Politeness theory and refusals of requests: Face threat as function of expressed obstacles’. Communication Studies, 55: 227-238. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510970409388616. Leopold, Lisa. (2015). ‘Request strategies in professional E-mail correspondence: Insights from the United States workplace’. Tesl Canada Journal/Revue Tesl Du Canada, 32(2): 1-29. https://doi.org/10.18806/tesl.v32i2.1205. Loko, Crépin D. (2018). ‘Analysis of speech acts in Donald Trump’s acceptance speech’. Revue Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée, de Littérature et d’Education, 1(1):233-248. Lyons, John. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English. (2005), 3rd edition. London: Oxford Dictionary Press. Probst, Nikita, Tatiana Shkapenko, Arina Tkachenko and Alexey Chernyakov. (2018). ‘Speech act of threat in everyday conflict discourse: Production and perception’. Lege Artis, 3(2): 204-250. DOI:10.2478/lart- 2018-0019. Ruzickova, Elena. (1998). Face, face threatening acts and politeness in Cuban Spanish. Unpublished MA thesis, University of Pittsburgh. Salgueiro, Antonio Blanco. (2010). ‘Promises, threats, and the foundations of speech act theory’. Pragmatics, 20 (2): 213-228. https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20.2.05bla. Searle, John R. (1979). Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John R. (1980). Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. Dordrecht: Reidel. Simona, Simona and Daniel Dejica-Cartisa. (2015). ‘Speech acts in written advertisements: Identification, classification and analysis’. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 192: 234 -239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.06.033. Tabatabaei, Soudabeh, Gonca Gencer, Isra Eldem and Morteza Bakhtiarvand. (2018). ‘A Comparative analysis of apology strategy between Turkish EFL learners and native speakers of English’. Applied Linguistics Research Journal, 2(3): 48–57. DOI: 10.14744/alrj.2018.33042. Walton, Douglas. (2014). ‘Speech acts and indirect threats in Ad Baculum arguments. A reply to Budzynska and Witek: Comment to: Non-inferential aspects of Ad Hominem and Ad Baculum’. Argumentation, 28(3): 317-324. DOI:10.1007/s10503-014-9318-2. Wierzbicka, Anna. (1987). English Speech Act Verbs: A Semantic Dictionary. London: Academic Press.