A semantic/pragmatic exploration of requests : politeness orientation in British English and Syrian Arabic

This study is concerned with probing the realization patterns of requests in
Syrian Arabic and British English to examine whether they follow a similar trend
across a variety of social situations. Hence, the analysis focuses on the different
patterns of requestive strategies and modification types speakers of the two languages
use. It additionally tests the extent to which the social variables of power, familiarity
and imposition can affect the choice of strategies and modification in the context of
these two languages.
Data were collected by means of a mixed-methods approach of discourse
completion test/task and interviews. A total of 2400 requests were elicited from 100
Syrian students and 100 British students. To gain qualitative insights, 20 follow-up
interviews were conducted with a subset of these students. The methodological
40 framework was based on a combination of Blum-Kulka et al.'s (1989) model for said
requests and Marti (2006) for unsaid requests.
Results have shown that both Syrian and British speakers favour conventionally
indirect strategies, thus confirming the findings of the Cross-Cultural Speech Acts
Realization Project (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989) that the conventionally indirect strategy
is the most frequently used strategy across cultures. However, the British and the
Syrian cultures display differences in the way they encode linguistic politeness.
Syrians were significantly more direct than the British, whereas the British were
significantly more conventionally indirect than their Syrian peers. It has been argued
that these differences stem from the different socio-cultural norms that control the
social interaction in these languages as well as the different politeness orientation of
the two cultures. This project aims to contribute to existing research in the field of
politeness and cross-cultural linguistics. It provides insights into politeness in the unresearched
Syrian culture