Arabic‐English bilinguals and the directive speech act

ABSTRACT: This paper has three goals: to describe the politeness strategies of Arabic in the performance of the directive speech act and contrast them with those in English; to test the politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978) with Arabic‐English bilinguals and Arabic monolinguals; and to explore the cultural determination of pragmatic norms in language. The data come from a carefully designed questionnaire of role‐playing situations. The analysis of results shows a strong support for the politeness theory; however, the theory fails to provide the real politeness value for directives whose aim is to benefit the addressee, e.g., in invitations. The treatment of ‘silence’ as a function of politeness under this theory seems also to be questionable. Therefore, we propose using Leech's (1983) model in part to adjust the theory to overcome these inadequacies. Further, descriptive analysis shows that Arabic has fewer modals than English and therefore different politeness strategies are used to make up for the politeness function of modals in English. The applied part of our paper shows that the culture in which a second or foreign language is learned shapes the pragmatic norms of that language.