LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 17:6 June 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
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         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
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         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
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The Speech Act of Compliment Response as Realized by Yemeni Arabic Speakers
M.A. Dissertation

Ameen Ali Mohammed Al-Gamal, MA, Linguistics, Doctoral Researcher

Abstract

A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication (e.g., apology, request or compliment). The speech act of compliments response has been chosen as the topic of the present study. The present study is a sociolinguistic study about the compliment responses utilised by Yemeni Arabic speakers. The data were collected through the use of written Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT hereafter), with four situational settings. 45 students from different universities in Yemen were involved as participants in the study. It is found that the group employed a variation in the use of strategies responding to compliments elicited by situational settings.

In this study, the researcher tried to find out the types of complement responses used by speakers of Yemeni Arabic variety. Since the participants of the study included males and females and used different compliment responses, the researcher tried to examine the types of compliment responses preferred by males as well as females. The researcher found out that the males and females of Yemeni Arabic variety do not use all types of compliment response strategies introduced by Herbert in (1989) such as "Comment History" type. In addition, it was found out that both genders preferred to use the "Appreciation Token" and "Return" compliment response types. The researcher concluded his study by looking at the similarities and differences between male and female speakers of Yemeni Arabic when responding to compliments given by the researcher in the form of a questionnaire.

This study falls into five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the problem, the speech act theories, the significance, the limitations, the questions of the study and the definitions of important terminologies. Chapter 2 presents a review of literature written in the previous studies on speech acts, mainly compliments and compliment responses employed by Arab and non-Arab researchers. Chapter 3 provides the methodology and the tools used to find the results of the study. Chapter 4 discusses the analyses and findings of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) in addition to discussing and comparing the findings of the current study to other studies in Arab and non-Arab societies. Chapter 5 gives a summary and conclusions and provides recommendations and suggestions for further studies.

Keywords: compliment, compliment response, speech acts, Yemeni Arabic speakers

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Ameen Ali M. Al-Gamal
Researcher
European Languages Department
King Abdul Aziz University
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
ameenaljammal@gmail.com
ameenaljammal@yahoo.com
Department of Linguistics
University of Kerala, India – 695581
ameenaljammal@gmail.com

Teaching Faculty
English Language Department
Faculty of Education, Thamar University
Republic of Yemen. B.O. Box: 87246 (Thamar University YEMEN)
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