English Abstract
Abstract :
This study aimed to investigate and compare the use of refusal and request
strategies by native speakers and Bahraini employees. Politeness in the request and
refusal speech acts was identified in reference to the research works by Brown and
Levinson (1987) and Matsumoto (1989), whereas formality was determined through
the findings of the research works by Li et al. (2015), Ernestus et al. (2015) and
Jassim and Nimehchisalem (2016). The respondents were 13 Bahrainis and 11 native
speakers, who all were employees. The methodology of the research was a Discourse
Completion Test, in which the request DCT was adopted from Merve and Deniz
(2019) and the refusal DCT was adopted from Rahma and Khalsa (2016). Changes
and modifications were made to fit the objectives of the study. The DCT included 2
sections, which are the request and refusal sections. Respondents of the study
interacted with four different work status situations in each of the two parts of the
DCT. The four situations were: Equal, Higher, Lower and Strange work status. The
findings of the study indicated that native English speakers used more directness and
politeness in their requests when in a higher work status than the interlocutors, while
Bahrainis used more directness and lesser formality and politeness with strangers in
the workplace. The findings of the study further showed that native speakers use more
directness, politeness and formality in their refusals in the equal, higher and lower
situations. The conclusion of the study is that there are major differences between
native speakers and Bahrainis regarding the use of requests and refusals. This is
regarding the emphasis on hierarchy by native speakers, which is not applied by the
Bahraini respondents. The research recommends that more English courses are
directed toward Bahrainis focus on the usage of speech acts in general and the refusal
and request in particular.
Key words: Speech acts, politeness, formality, directness, indirectness
