Favor-Asking as Used by Jordanian University Students: A Socio-Pragmatic Study

Abstract

This paper contributes to the existing literature on an important aspect of politeness by investigating the linguistic performance of the speech act of favor-asking as used by Jordanian university students. Specifically, it aims to explore the effect of gender and social distance on favor-asking performance. Data were collected from 100 Jordanian university students (50 males and 50 females) studying at two Jordanian universities: Jordan University of Science & Technology and Yarmouk University. The data were analyzed based on the speech act theory, using the content analysis model (i.e., the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) proposed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). Results demonstrated that the core strategy used in favor-asking among the students is significantly affected by gender and social distance. Conventionally indirect strategies (CISs) were found to be the most used category among all strategies; however, the female participants tended to use them much more often than the male participants. Keywords: Favour-asking, Applied linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Jordanian society.