School of Humanities

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https://hdl.handle.net/2440/84547
This collection contains Honours, Masters and Ph.D by coursework theses from University of Adelaide postgraduate students within the School of Humanities. The material has been approved as making a significant contribution to knowledge.

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Browsing School of Humanities by Author "Alhaidari, Abdulrahman Ahmad"

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    The art of saying no: A cross-cultural pragmatic comparison of Saudi and Australian refusal appropriateness applied in academic settings
    (2009) Alhaidari, Abdulrahman Ahmad; Mickan, Peter Frank; Walsh, John
    The purpose of this present study is to investigate the cross-cultural pragmatics of refusal speech acts generated by Saudi native Arabic speakers and Australian native English speakers in academic settings. The Instrumentation of data collection developed by the study utilised a combination of discourse completion tests and role play. The participants in this study were composed of four groups: Saudi teachers, Australian teachers, Saudi students, and Australian students. Twenty Saudi teachers and students were interviewed in Um Al-Qura University in Makkah city, and resulted in 180 refusals. Similarly, twenty Australian teachers and students were interviewed in Adelaide University in Adelaide city, and resulted in 180 refusals as well. Each given refusal was analysed into speech acts and strategies, and formed semantic formulas for the given refusals. The generated data was analysed to identify the contrasting strategies adopted by both language speakers while formulating their refusal utterances and its frequencies. After determining the unshared refusal strategies among the counter participants of the study, further investigations were carried on, and collected from other participants to shed some light on the understandings and interpretations formed by the different language speakers. It was found that while all groups applied indirect refusal strategies adopting many similar strategies, they differed in many aspects, such as: length, strategies, frequencies, and content of the semantic formulas. The findings of this study also suggest that people from both countries when xi using unshared refusal strategies, risk threatening the face of both interlocutors by sending negative messages and conveying negative personal images while interacting with each other. Another conclusion of the study suggests the inappropriateness of using written discourse completion tests, which have been conducted by most of the previous studies, as they fail to convey the Arabic language used in real life activities rather than formal written forms