A Pragmatic Analysis of Speech Acts as Produced by Arab ESL Learners: A Study in Interlanguage Pragmatics

A Pragmatic Analysis of Speech Acts as Produced by Native Speakers of Arabic in English is a study that aims at exploring one important aspect of the communicative competence of the second language learners. This aspect is “the pragmatic ability to perform speech acts” and the subjects under investigation are the Arab users of English as a second language in the Indian context. The particular speech acts investigated are: requests, invitations, apologies and correction of a factual error. Three major features of the pragmatic competence of the second language learners of English are highlighted in each chapter: a) Speech act realization patterns including the different types of modifications that play a role in deciding the illocutionary force of a speech act. b) The ability to perform politeness functions and the cross-cultural variations implied. c) Pragmatic transfer and the influence of cultural and linguistic background on the production of pragmatic performance in L2.