A Comparative Pragmatic Study of the Speech Act Offering between English Na

Abstract

The aim of this study is to explore the differences and similarities between English and Kurdish languages when using speech act offer strategies in different social contexts. The study has made use of Discourse Completion Test (DCT) that consists of 8 situations designed to elicit the speech act of offering between the participants. The study, more specifically, attempted to find out whether there was any pragmatic transfer. It also examined the perception of directness/indirectness in the realisation of offer strategies in both languages. The DCT was administrated to 30 Kurdish male and female speakers and 30 English male and female speakers. The study adopted Barron's (2003) classification of speech acts as a theoretical framework. The study concluded that English and Kurdish participants used different offer strategies; the most used strategies were; Query preparatory, mood derivable, locution derivable, hedged performatives. Kurdish speakers used direct strategies more, while English speakers used indirect strategies more. Factors of gender do not have any effect among Kurdish participants, in contrary among English participants, females used indirect strategies more, and males used direct strategies more. This study also revealed that Kurdish speakers seem to be pragmatically less competent than English native speakers.