SPEECH ACTS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH AND PALESTINIAN ARABIC

This study attempted to examine how both English and Arabic realize certain speech acts, mainly authoritative speech acts, promising and thanking. For this purpose, an analysis of spontaneous naturally-occurring utterances comprised of declaratory speech acts, commissives, and thanking in both English and Arabic was conducted. In the light of this analysis, the study highlighted interesting differences displayed by the two languages as to how they realize the given speech acts at the level of structures and lexical items used. The study also showed that cross-cultural and pragmalinguistic characteristics of Arabic speech acts as compared with their counterparts in English are of paramount importance for sociolinguistic, contrastive, semantic and translation studies.