Speech act of congratulation in Lebanese Arabic and English among university students in Lebanon.

Abstract

Speech acts have been of great interest to researchers, and although they are universal, the production and perception of a speech act is highly dependent on culture and language. This study investigated the linguistic politeness strategies used by university students in Lebanon when expressing congratulation in Lebanese Arabic and English. It also examined the influence of gender, power, and social distance on their choices of strategies. Data were collected by means of Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT), which was administered to 49 students (25 males, 24 females), enrolled in English 203 (Academic English) at the American University of Beirut (AUB). The DCT was written in both languages, Lebanese Arabic and English. It consisted of 6 items related to happy news, where the participants had to respond as if they were found in those specific situations. Data was coded and analyzed based on Elwood’s (2004) taxonomy of congratulation strategies. The results showed that Lebanese students generally used 13 types of congratulatory strategies to congratulate people in English and Arabic. In the English data, Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID), expression of happiness, expression of validation, and offer of good wishes were the most frequently used strategies. Meanwhile, in the Arabic data, IFID, invocation of God’s name, expression of validation, and request for information were preferred. The findings indicated that Lebanese students had both collectivistic as well as individualistic tendencies (Ayyash-Abdo, 2001), which was evident in their choice of strategies in both languages. On a macro level, this might be attributed to Lebanon being a part of Arab world, yet also having a multilingual and cosmopolitan nature. Moreover, on a micro level, as students of one of the best English-medium universities in the Middle East, this might also be attributed to the participants having successfully internalized the pragmatics and communication styles of English culture. Since this study also explored the