The Philosophy of Requesting in Official Letters: Arab Higher Educational Institutions

Abstract

This study analyses requesting as a pragmatic speech act. Pragmatics study language usage by examining meaning as understood in the speaker’s mind and receiver’s interpretation and focusing on what people mean by their words. In addition, this study investigates the use of requests by identifying their strategies and supportive moves. This is achieved by examining speech acts in the communications of a specific educational institution: King Faisal University. The data obtained are analysed pragmatically in accordance with, in particular, politeness theory and the concept of face. This provides us with a clear vision of the use of requests in a specific social and cultural environment and enables us to identify the strategies and supportive moves (internal and external) that speakers employ to successfully perform their speech acts. The results show the prevalence of direct strategy usage with their four models, avoidance of directness (particularly through the use of hints), interest in using external supportive moves in requests and a lack of internal supportive moves to support and mitigate requests. In general, the data shows structural similarity, which indicates the existence of a specific perception for communications in the institution.