Directness and Indirectness of Speech Acts in Requests among American Native English Speakers and Saudi Native Speakers of Arabic

Within the scope of the field of Pragmatics includes the study of speech acts. Yule (1996) defines a speech act as "an action performed by the use of an utterance to communicate" (48). This communication occurs between the speaker and the hearer. This study compares the directness and indirectness of speech acts of requests by investigating Arabic and English data among American speakers of English and Saudi speakers of Arabic. Differences are revealed between the two groups in terms of formulating requests and how social power and social distance between interlocutors may affect the choice of using these strategies of requests in the same given situations. Based on the results, the researcher found that most Saudi native speakers of Arabic used direct requests when requesting to their intimate friends and when superiors were requesting to their inferiors. However, most American native speakers of English have a tendency to use indirect requests including hints and context embedded meaning when addressing unfamiliar friends and when inferiors are addressing their superiors.