The Speech Act of Thanking as a Compliment Response as used by the Arab Speakers of English –a Comparative Intercultural Study

The Speech Act of Thanking as a Compliment Response as used by the Arab Speakers of English –a Comparative Intercultural Study PDF

Sana' Mohammed Ibrahim Al Khateeb

Supervisor(s)

Dr.Aymen Nazzal - الدكتور أحمد عوض

Discussion Commity

Dr. Ayman Nazzal Chairman Dr. Omar An-Najjar, External Examiner Dr. Fayez Aqel, Internal Examiner Dr. Ahmed Awad(co-supervisor),

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Abstract :

This pragmatic study investigated the speech act of thanking as a compliment response as used by non-native speakers of English. The study is an attempt to find whether different cultural backgrounds, specializations, levels of evaluation and the gender of the speakers affect their use of the speech act of thanking as a compliment response. The researcher adopted a discourse completion test (DCT) in both Arabic and English as the tool of the study in order to reach the answers of the following questions: 1- Are there any significant differences in the ways people from different cultural backgrounds realize the speech act of thanking? There are significant differences in the ways Arab learners of English and native speakers of English use the speech act of thanking due to the differences in their cultural backgrounds. 2- Are there differences in the way non-native speakers from different specializations (English majors, scientific stream students, literary stream students, and vocational stream students) use the speech act of thanking as a compliment response? There are significant differences in the ways Arab learners of English use the speech act of thanking due to the differences in their specializations. 3- Does the gender of the speaker affect their use of the speech act of thanking as a compliment response? There are no significant differences in the ways Arab learners of English use the speech act of thanking due to the gender of the speakers. 4- Does the level of evaluation affect the non-native speakers' use of the speech act of thanking as a compliment response? There are significant differences in the ways Arab speakers of English use the speech act of thanking due to their proficiency levels. The study falls into five chapters. Chapter one introduces the problem, the aims, the significance, the limitations and the methods of the study. Chapter two gives a review of literature written on the previous studies on pragmatics and speech acts, mainly compliments and thanking. Chapter Three provides the methodology and the tools used to find the results of the study. Chapter Four shows the findings of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) in addition to discussing and comparing them to the other studies in other languages. Chapter Five gives a summary and conclusions and provides recommendations and suggestions for further studies.

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