Socio-pragmatic Transfer in Egyptian Refusals

Abstract

Producing accurate and comprehensible language requires grammatical and syntactic knowledge; however, language accuracy does not ensure avoiding miscommunication which arises from the inappropriate use of speech acts. Thus, speech acts are among the prominent areas that have been investigated in the field of Inter-language pragmatics (ILP). Hence, the current study examines the realizations of the speech act of refusal by young adult Egyptian students in their L1 (Egyptian Arabic) and L2 (English). The study also explores the socio-pragmatic features of Egyptian refusals in terms of power and distance. 2270 cases of refusals were collected by means of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and field notes. The sample consists of 200 DCTs and 60 instances of refusals extracted from field notes collected by the researcher from natural observations. The data are analyzed according to an adaptation of the taxonomy of refusal strategies (RS) by Beebe et al. (1990). The findings reflect a great amount of positive pragmatic transfer as most of the participants' refusals are indirect refusals. The main strategies that are used include statements of explanations, statements of alternatives, and statements of regret. In addition, adjuncts to refusals such as gratitude and positive opinion are used in refusals to interlocutors of equal and higher power. Furthermore, the results reveal an amount of negative pragmatic transfer in the participants' L2 refusals. Finally, practical implications and future recommendations are suggested based on the given results.

The Pragmatic Transfer of Javanese Sojourners’ English in Conversation Strategies

“…However, the Javanese metaphor is currently known among Javanese society as a mockery or a joke. In his research Darwis also confirmed indigenous socio-cultural knowledge in the foreign language (Darwish, 2018). Different kind of mitigation was found in the phrase 'may be' that mostly appear before the propositional utterances.…”

“…Some facts may provide the reason why it happened. These belong to non-structural factors that affect the emergent of pragmatic transfer, namely, as also found by Darwish (Darwish, 2018), some socio-cultural factors (Önal & Turgut, 2017) like home and host cultural schemas, degree of interaction (exposure) with the host society and other factors like host language proficiency, length of stay and motivation.…”

“…Some are seen in the refusal of Persian foreign language learners (Hashemian, 2012), which looked a lot like their first language; in the Iraqi Arabic native speakers who neglected to apply 'verbal' refusal strategy (Al Qunayeer, 2019;Turki et al, 2020), also in the Javanese learners of English refusal variety which was similar more to that of native Javanese refusal (Wijayanto, 2016). Positive, pragmatic transfers were found in rejection that reflected some socio-cultural aspects related to the first language, such as non-verbal rejection and mention of God in English (Darwish, 2018). As seen in retaining the first language habits and communication patterns, pragmatic transfer was found when the speakers used another language.…”

Translation techniques of Bilingual and Trilingual EFL Teachers and Students' Cognitive Retroactive Transfer CRT strategies in Halayeb Schools

“…In the Egyptian context, there are various studies that discussed the strategies related to linguistic transfer followed by EFL students (e,g. Darwish, 2018;Kharboush, 2016;Yousef, 1983). For instance, over a sample of 35 Egyptian secondary school students, Kharboush (2016) aimed at probing some discrepancies in the Egyptian secondary stage students" proficiency in translation, attributed to lexical and semantic transfer from Arabic to English, reflected through a set of language tasks.…”