Sudanese University Students’ Arabic and English Request Modifiers

Abstract

This study has aimed at studying request modifications produced by Sudanese university students in Arabic and English. It has compared and contrasted the pragmatic features in the production of the subjects in the two languages in an attempt to identify the universal and culture-specific ones. It attempted to classify the modifiers used by the subjects. It also tried to find out subjects’ preferences of the different modification types and the reasons behind them. The subjects were two hundred students who responded to Arabic and English Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs). The study showed that the subjects used a shared group of universal modifications that included eleven internal modifiers and six external ones when responding to the two DCTs. It has been found that the subjects preferred to use interrogatives, politeness devices, past tenses, grounders, and checking on availability more than the others. They did not use negations and downtoners in Arabic and used embedded if-clauses, consultative devices, and hedges sparsely. It also revealed other culture-specific types that did not appear in the Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Realization Project (CCSARP)i.e. alternatives, religious appealing markers, and other types of speech acts. The subjects’ choices were determined by linguistic, social, cultural, religious, and contextual factors.