Request Speech Research Articles

L2 Korean learners’ pragmalinguistic features

Abstract This study investigates the pragmalinguistic features of Korean as a Foreign Language (KFL) learners’ request speech acts in power-asymmetrical situations, focusing on interactions with social superiors. Through a discourse completion test (DCT), 31 KFL students and 12 Korean native speakers (KNS) were analyzed using a coding system which is developed based on the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Despite acquiring basic linguistic elements, KFL learners struggle to apply them effectively, particularly in nuanced social contexts. The findings underscore the necessity of explicit instruction on the pragmalinguistic functions of grammatical forms to bridge the gap between classroom learning and real-world language use. This study contributes valuable insights into the intercultural pragmatics of KFL learners, addressing gaps in the literature regarding the detailed analysis of learners’ language use in request speech acts, especially in situations involving social superiors. The pedagogical implications emphasize the need for enhanced instruction in KFL pragmatics to cultivate learners’ pragmatic awareness.

The Effect of Activities-Based Teaching in The English Context on EFL University Students

This study presents a pragmatic approach focusing on the meaning of speech and knowledge regarding the undergraduate students' understanding and utilization of speech act ‘request’ within the Department of English Language at the College of Arts. Quantitative approach has been employed to analyze request strategies by using an open-ended questionnaire comprising sixteen diverse scenarios to gather data on various request speech acts. The study investigates the effectiveness of instructional interventions in developing students' proficiency in this speech act. The findings from the pre-tests revealed that students exhibited comparable performance across all three strategies: direct requests, conventionally indirect requests, and non-conventionally indirect requests have been assessed in terms of both awareness and production levels. Despite the initial similarity in performance among learners, substantial improvements have been observed after the instructional phase. Specifically, individuals within the experimental group demonstrated notable enhancements in their awareness and production of requests, coupled with a decreased reliance on direct request strategies. These findings underscore the potential for pragmatics instruction rich in input to enhance learners' identification and utilization of suitable pragmatic elements within diverse social contexts. Overall, the study highlights the importance of pragmatic education in foreign language learning, suggesting its efficacy in fostering learners' pragmatic competence.

“But Never Do be Long Without Writing Us, for Altho' Many Miles Divide Us We Have Your Welfare at Heart”: An Analysis of Requests in Intimate Discourse in Irish Emigrants’ Letters (1700–1940)

This article concentrates on the analysis of requestive speech acts from the point of view of (im)politeness studies within the context of historical letter-writing. It draws its data from a sub-corpus of the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) containing letters written by Irish emigrants that settled in the United States and their intimates. The scope of this research is limited to intimate discourse to perform a cohesive study of the encoding of this speech act within a particular framework of usage in a particular genre. This study classifies a total of 254 requests extracted from this sub-corpus and observes the major tendencies that appear in this specific context. Results show a clear preference for the usage of impositive head act strategies (95.68% of the results). Imperatives (50.9%), want statements (27.8%), and performatives (9.8%) are the most recurrent head act strategies in this set of data. Conversely, indirect requests show a much lower number of hits (4.32%). Moreover, the data showed a preference for external modification or no modification at all. These results point towards the idea that directness might have been conventionalized as a sign of positive politeness between family members in the context of historical letter writing. Some reservations about generalizations with regards to the data are expressed and further research lines are proposed in order to establish a more solid understanding of the encoding of requestive speech acts in the context of historical letter writing.

A Corpus-based Study of Pragmatic Competence of English Preservice Teachers: Taking Error Types of Request Speech Act as an Example

A Corpus-based Study of Pragmatic Competence of English Preservice Teachers: Taking Error Types of Request Speech Act as an Example

‘Men More Polite Than Women?': Gender Differences Study of Bimanese Interaction in Requesting

This study examines gender differences in request speech and politeness, focusing on how men and women use different linguistic strategies to convey requests politely. This study aims to analyze the alerter and supporting speech elements in request speech in the Bima language as spoken by male and female students. It also compares the request speech elements used by men and women. Using a qualitative approach, the data analyzed consists of request utterances in the Bima language. Data were collected through recording techniques and discourse completion tests. The data analysis involved categorizing the speech elements as units of analysis, focusing on alerter and supporting elements, and classifying them based on Blum-Kulka’s framework. The analysis revealed that male speech tended to demonstrate familiarity with the interlocutor through the varied use of alerter greetings, while female speech showed politeness by employing supporting speech. This difference indicates that men are more inclined to use positive politeness strategies, whereas women tend to use negative politeness strategies.

Thanking Expressions in Spoken Nigerian English: A Conversational Analysis

This paper investigates Conversational Routines of Thanking in Spoken Nigerian English. Everyday utterances are made through the use of language whether spoken or written. Thanking is prevalent basically in conversations. The selected speech acts for this study is thanking. Subjects for this study were drawn from three federal Universities from the South-South Region in Nigeria. They included: University of Uyo, University of Calabar and University of Port Harcourt. Data for this study were collected from three different speech interactions, namely: face-to-face conversations (FTFC), telephone conversations (TC) and vote of thanks (VOT). Data were collected through the use of a mini-tape recorder. Here, a Corpus of conversations were selected using purposive sampling method and surreptitiously collected from strategic points. This enabled the researcher to collect the Corpus in its original form. They were collected at different points where the students meet: lecture halls, hostels, canteens, relaxation centres among others. The framework for the analysis of this study is provided by the Speech Act theory. Frequency of the distribution between the male and female subjects, were calculated using the mean statistical method. This study found out that beyond the main functions of thanking, it also performs an array of other functions. Data have also revealed that the multilingual situation in Nigeria has affected the choices of language use, resulting in features such as code-mixing, slangs, Nigerian English-based pidgin, among others. This study has specifically shown that apart from classifying thanking as expressive speech act, it can further be classified as declarative, commissive and requestive speech acts. Therefore, this study concludes that with regard to thanking, the co-existence of English with other indigenous languages have given rise to linguistic patterns and forms, identifying Nigerian English as a distinct variety of the world Englishes. Keywords: Conversational routines, Thanking, Spoken Nigerian English, Nigerian Identity, Speech Acts.

An Analysis of Speech Acts: Request in Daily Conversation

In daily conversation, people frequently communicate implicitly as an issue that is covered in illocutionary acts. Illocutionary acts have five types, they are representative/assertive, directive, commissive, expressive and declaration. This research was aimed to analyze the used of request in daily conversation in the sentences form. The request speech acts were analyzed based on the Yule theory and the type of sentences based on Frank theory. The data were taken from the daily conversation between the researcher and the speaker in daily life. The subject of this research was researcher’s friend who doing talk with the researcher. This research employed qualitative research. The result of this research showed that there are three types of sentences, namely; statement sentences, interrogative sentences, and imperative sentences. From the total data 25 sentence, the researcher found that there are 18 sentences of imperative (72%), 5 sentences of interrogative (20%), and 2 sentences of statement (2%). Therefore, the most dominant type of sentence used by the speaker is imperative sentence. Meanwhile, the least type of sentence used by speaker is statement sentence. The speaker often used imperative sentence because of its function to get the hearer to do something. Imperative sentence can be used for directive speech act because the speaker wants the hearer or target to do what the speaker says.

THE USE OF REQUESTS IN PANDEMIC PRESS RELEASES. A CROSS-CULTURAL CASE STUDY

The current paper presents an analysis of the realisation of requests in three European linguacultures - British English, Spanish, and Romanian - as expressed in weekly press releases during the Covid-19 pandemic. A comparative study that looks into the Request Speech Act, more precisely into its various forms of expression and its conventional realisation patterns, was conducted according to a cross-cultural pragmatic analysis framework. The conclusive observations underline the fact that each linguaculture constructs a culture-bound pattern for the realisation of the Request Speech Act, despite certain similarities explicable due to common origins or global linguistic influences.

Production of Politeness by Myanmar (Burmese) Native Speakers in Requests

This research aims to examine the production of politeness in Myanmar (Burmese) native speakers via the request speech act. The politeness theory of Brown and Levison (1987) was deployed to investigate the responses elicited from the informants. The data consists of quantitative approach (Discourse completion test). Forty-nine male and female Myanmar (Burmese) native speakers with different ages and educational backgrounds responded to the questionnaire. The findings of this research argued for the adequacy of the theories of Brown and Levison (1987) for the Myanmar (Burmese) context. In addition, a new politeness strategy, "using politeness markers," was suggested. Employments of politeness strategies in making the requests varied depending on the different social variables. Three characteristics of using politeness strategies by Myanmar (Burmese) native speakers are also laid out. The framework of politeness production in the request by Myanmar (Burmese) native speakers was proposed to fulfill the goal of third-wave politeness research.

초등 예비교사들의 영어 화용에 대한 인식

This study investigates the extent of pragmatic awareness in English of primary
 pre-service teachers. It addresses two research questions. First, do Korean learners of
 English exhibit a marked discrepancy between grammatical awareness and pragmatic
 awareness? Second, if they are less aware of pragmatic violations than grammatical
 errors, how does this manifest in their speech act strategies? To answer the first
 question, a written survey on pragmatic awareness was carried out with Korean
 pre-service teachers (N = 28). To address the second question, an acceptability
 judgment task was conducted with another group of Korean pre-service teachers (N
 = 32) and English natives (N = 65). The results showed that Korean pre-service teachers
 were less aware of pragmatic violations than grammatical errors and that their speech
 act strategies deviated from those of English natives. Regarding apology speech acts,
 they tended to use more semantic formulas compared to English natives. Concerning
 request speech acts, they relied on politeness markers rather than the negative politeness
 strategies preferred by the English natives. Finally, the study offers some suggestions
 for enhancing their pragmatic competence.

Emirati University Students’ Use of the Request Speech Act in Arabic in Email Communication with Faculty

Students’ academic performance is greatly affected by their communication skills, a significant one of which is email writing. Due to technological advances and the distance education imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a great deal of communication between students and professors is in the form of email communication. Students’ inattention to the rules of this particular genre may result in face-threatening situations. Prompted by the lack of research on university students’ utilization of the request speech act in Arabic emails, this study investigated 96 Emirati first-year students’ request behaviors in Arabic in communication with university professors. Data were collected using a discourse-completion task and an evaluation form filled in by two judges. Results showed that the students mostly produced a direct request speech act. However, a significant number of them failed to follow the expected discourse structure often omitting the subject line, not thanking or writing their names at the end. The judges thought the emails were generally respectful. However, they felt they were not appropriate, which was mainly caused by the frequent mistakes with spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary. There were also instances of informal language use and grammatical errors. Based on these results, recommendations are provided focusing on awareness-raising and practice activities.

A Systematic Literature Review on Comparative Study of Request for the Past Ten Years (2012-2022)

This systematic literature review attempts to examine the current status, unsolved issues and future trend of the comparative study of request speech act for the past ten years (2012-2022). Based on the analysis of 186 studies, the findings are: 1) the status quo is that intralingual comparative studies of request are still very few and previous researches reply on DCT and CCSARP instruments too much; 2) unsolved issues include further investigation of intralingual comparative request, Asian languages, and the development of new or more advanced instrument; and 3) future trend is that more comparative studies of request need to be conducted on Asian languages, especially Mandarin and Malay from intralingual perspective and new or more advanced data collection and analysis instruments should be applied. This systematic literature review could help identify the research gap and unsolved problems in the current literature that calls for the further investigation of comparative request speech act.
 
 Received: 30 December 2022 / Accepted: 26 February 2023 / Published: 5 March 2023

Монгол, англи хэлний гуйх хэлэхүйн үйлдлийн зэрэгцүүлсэн судалгаа

The current study focused on cross-cultural comparison of requestive speech act realization patterns in Mongolian and English. This study aimed to compare patterns in the requests provided by native Mongolian speakers (n=86) and native speakers of American English (n=87) under the same social constraints involving nine different situations. Data were gathered through the discourse completion test (DCT) in which the participants were asked to complete the discourse with appropriate request patterns consistent with the given situation. Students were undergraduate students (sophomores and juniors) in their native countries. The data were processed in accordance with request strategies developed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1984). According to the degree of directness, all request strategies were classified into three major categories, particularly (1) direct strategies, (2) conventionally indirect strategies, and (3) unconventionally indirect strategies.

Iranian EFL Learners’ Production of Online English Requests: Effects of Technology-Mediated Task-Based Instruction

This quasi-experimental study scrutinized the impact of technology-mediated TBLT in an online collaborative and individual EFL learning environment on the development of request production of 20 male and female B.A. students of TEFL. The participants were divided into two equal individual and collaborative experimental groups to receive online video-prompt task-based instruction on request speech act production in six distinct situations defined based on different contextual variables including distance, power, and imposition. Two similar versions of video-prompt Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) focusing on six situations covered in online classes were given to the participants as a pretest and posttest. The results indicated that both groups’ request speech act production improved significantly after the intervention. However, there was no significant difference between the performance of the two groups. It was then concluded that both techniques are facilitative in boosting students’ pragmatic competence; however, more time is required to find out the extent to which these techniques differ in terms of their productiveness.

Oscillatory Neural Responses for Order and Request Speech Acts: An EEG Study on Bengali Utterances

Oscillatory Neural Responses for Order and Request Speech Acts: An EEG Study on Bengali Utterances

Pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic patterns of requestive acts in English and Italian: Insights from film conversation

This cross-cultural pragmatic study is centred on whether (in)directness (e.g. Leech, 2014) and social distance (cf. Brown and Levinson, 1987) have an effect on illocutionary modification of requestive speech acts. The latter effect has been addressed by accounting for a large-scale tendency towards the overt employment of intensifiers or mitigators, occurring as an intersubjectified surplus of meaning (Tantucci, 2021). The context of our enquiry is requestive behaviour in dialogic filmic interaction, as it bears acknowledged similarities with spontaneous interaction (Rose, 2001; Baños Piñero and Chaume, 2009). After collecting and annotating data from the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue (Pavesi et al., 2014), we designed a multifactorial corpus-based study and compared the requestive behaviour in English vs Italian interaction. We fitted a multinomial logistic regression model which showed that social distance and (in)directness significantly affect the use of mitigating vs intensifying strategies. We also discovered that such correlations seem to be relatively stable across the two languages: mitigation is normally used with high social distance and when requests are made indirectly. However, Italian is somewhat distinctive in the way intensifying modifiers are used among socially close interactants. We suggest that corpus-based analysis of modification strategies may also be extended to non-scripted speech. Such a research agenda would decisively contribute to advancing usage-based approaches to cross-cultural (im)politeness, as most of the methods deployed in this area to date are still confined to elicited and conjured up speech.

A Comparative Analysis of Pragmatics in the Perspective of Intercultural Communication

As an international Chinese language teacher who will go overseas for internship, it is very necessary to master the discourse rules in different cultural backgrounds, which plays a crucial role in the smooth implementation of intercultural communication. In this paper, through the author's four personal experiences of cross-cultural communication, as four cases of analyzing the discourse rules of cross-cultural communication, we will combine the relevant discourse rules and authoritative communication theories, such as Grice's principle of conversational cooperation, Edward-T-Hall's theory of high-context and low-context culture, Leech's principle of politeness, Brown and Levinson's theory of face, and so on, to analyze the discourse rules of appellative speech, introduction speech, greeting speech, etc. The differences in language terms such as appellative speech, introductory speech, greeting speech, invitation speech, request speech, compliment speech, and thank you speech are compared and explained, and the cultural conflicts and cultural communication phenomena involved are specifically analyzed.

Realization of politeness strategies in EFL learners and English native speakers’ complaint and request speech acts: focusing on differences by gender and level of education

This study aimed to identify EFL learners and English native speakers’ use of politeness strategies in the compliant and request speech acts. To do so, a 50-item questionnaire was developed and given to 108 EFL learners with three different levels of education in both genders, who were selected randomly from Sheikhbahaee University and the University of Isfahan. The EFL learners’ request and complaint emails in three levels of education and English native speakers’ emails in both genders were also gathered. The data were analyzed based on Nogami and Rinnert's (2006), and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) models of complaint and request speech acts. Accordingly, the results of this study indicated that the EFL learners’ perceptions in the use of request and complaints’ politeness strategies were not in line with their actual performance in emails. It was also found that there were significant differences between levels and genders in request and complaint emails: because MA and BA female students and male native speakers expressed their request emails in a direct way, but male EFL students and female native speakers represented their complaints in a direct way.

INTERNATIONAL DEBATER’S POLITENESS STRATEGY IN INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATICS OF REQUEST

The study aims to investigate the speech acts of international debaters in the 2022 Asian English Olympics in giving requests. This study focuses on the request speech acts and the politeness strategy produced by international debaters with different cultural backgrounds. This study used a qualitative approach because it observed the request speech acts of international debaters in applying the politeness strategy. There were four participants, consisting of Uzbekistan, Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaysian debaters. The data contained the requests delivered by the international debaters conducted through WhatsApp messenger, both group and private messages. In collecting the data, the researcher was a part of the participants in the debate competition. Thus, the researcher could collect the data in the private group made special for the participants who joined the debate competition. Additionally, the researcher's relationship with the participants was the opponent of the debate team. Finally, it is found that the request speech acts by showing a demand, command, and force expression. Thus, politeness strategy, social distance in which, status and relationship, and background impact the way of giving requests.

Between Multicultural Students, Speech Act, and Politeness

This study aims to reveal the use of directive speech acts of multicultural students studying in Malang City in the context of politeness. Qualitative descriptive is the method used in this study. There are five tribes that are the subject of this research, namely Java, Sumba, Flores, Dayak, and Madura. Data were collected by using questionnaires, interviews, and observations. The data obtained were analysed based on how they used directive request speech act in different situations in the domain of family, friendship, and school and how they minimized the FTA that might occurs when facing different speech partners. The results of this study indicate that from the four aspects that become the parameters of this study, multicultural students in using directive speech acts have the following pattern: In the aspect of direct / indirect speech acts, in three different domains, all multicultural students use direct speech acts, as well as in the honorific aspect. The use of hedge aspects is more widely used in the campus domain. Meanwhile, in the aspect of speech level, only Javanese and Madurese students use it.