request

This study aimed to explore the refusal strategies used by Saudi English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduate students as well as to examine the relationship of these strategies to social status in the situations of request, invitation, offer, and suggestion. It provided an answer to the research question, what are the strategies used by EFL undergraduate students when performing the speech act of refusal and whether these strategies vary according to status in the situations of request, invitation, offer, and suggestion? The participants were 150 Saudi EFL students. Data were derived using a discourse completion task. It was composed of three request situations, three invitation situations, three offer situations, and three suggestion situations. Each of those situations consisted of a refusal to a person of a higher status, another one for a person of equal status, and finally one for a person of a lower status. Beebe et al. (1990) taxonomy was selected as the most comprehensive one for the analysis of refusal strategies. The results indicated that the most popular refusal strategies the participants used were the indirect ones, followed by the direct ones and then by adjuncts. The results also revealed that the participants refused differently in each of the four types of situations. On the other hand, the results showed that social status has no significant influence on their use of refusal strategies. Based on these findings, some recommendations for the integration of pragmatic teaching were suggested to foster pragmatic competence among undergraduate students.

Unprecedented interest in pragmatic abilities of competent speakers of language has raised some questions regarding the nature of pragmatic competence in different languages. Acquisition of pragmatics in early bilinguals has the advantage of illuminating the similarities and differences of pragmatic competence across languages. The purpose of this study was to investigate the comprehension of indirect requests and the production of requests in early bilinguals which is underrepresented in literature on pragmatic acquisition. At the same time the secondary purpose of the study was to tackle another gap in similar studies of first language acquisition, that is, reflecting on the implications of research findings for teaching pragmatics. The participants of the study were two bilinguals aged 3.5 and 2.4 at the start of the study which lasted for 8 months. The data comes from diary notes and recordings of the children"s interaction with their mothers and in some cases their peers as well as their responses to indirect requests made by the researchers. The data were analyzed both qualitatively (using Straus and Corbin"s (1998) model) and quantitatively (using chi-square tests). The analysis revealed that their comprehension of indirect requests did not differ significantly in the two languages and their production of requests was similar regarding the types of requests in the two languages. The findings suggest that there might be one pragmatic competence for both of the languages which bilinguals draw upon in production of requests and comprehension of indirect requests. The implications for teaching pragmatics are also discussed.

This essay for the inaugural issue of Technology and Language explores the notion of animatechnics in its two meanings: living technology and animal technology. On the one hand, there is a fiction or utopian component in this notion, on the other hand, it raises the question about technical life beyond the human: Can technology be alive-other than metaphorically? How does animal technical life work? These questions can be fused into one and suggest the notion not of the command but of the request as a technical operation.
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В этом эссе для первого выпуска журнала "Технологии в инфосфере" ("Technology and Language") ставится вопрос об аниматехнике, о двух возможных значениях этого термина: живые технологии и технологии животных. С одной стороны, в этом вопросе содержится элемент фикции и утопии, с другой стороны, он возникает как вопрос о технической жизни за пределами человеческого, об инструментальном поведении животных. Может ли техника-не метафорически-быть живой? Как устроена техническая сторона жизни животных? Две вопросительные линии соединяются этим эссе в один вопрос: в вопрос о просьбе как технической операции.

https://soctech.spbstu.ru/en/article/2020.1.12/

The present study investigates the frequently used speech acts related to positive and negative politeness techniques employed in requests and apologies by faculty members at King Abdulaziz University. Social interaction on University Campus reflects Hejazi culture located in the Western Region of Saudi Arabia. The significance of the study arises from its focus on university-life interaction between faculty members as it provides an investigation of positive and negative politeness strategies. The paper tries to answer two questions: 1) Is there a relationship between the faculty's years of experience and the request strategies employed? 2) Is there a relationship between the faculty years of experience and the apology strategies used? To answer these questions, a Discourse Completion Test was developed and given to 30 faculty members. The findings of the study show that social power, which is derived from having more years of experience, affects the request and apology strategies used among Saudi female faculty members. Faculty members of an older generation tend to use syntactically more extended sentences in requests compared to their younger colleagues, to alleviate the sense of their social power and save others' sense of face. In contrast, the more youthful faculty members tended to use syntactically longer sentences in apologies compared to their older colleagues to show more respect. The study was conducted in Women Campus, and it is recommended to implement it on a larger scale with more participants to get more complete results.