A Pragmatic Analysis of the Speech Act of Warning by Kurdish EFL Learners in Social Contexts

Abstract

Language is considered as a social behavioral phenomenon for human beings. It is the essential tool for communicative interaction among people. Humans use language to convey their thoughts, feelings, and wishes to others.  Language is enriched by the speakers who use language for a specific purpose in a specific situation to convey meanings that help the language user to transmit information. Moreover, situational meanings are delivered by different forms of language use that occur in various contexts.

In this paper, the speech act of warning has been examined to identify ten social situations applied on EFL Kurdish senior students at the English department. The research method adopted is a qualitative and a quantitative approach to analyze the data. The selected situation consists of 5 options introduced to the selected participants to select the suitable answer for warning strategies according to their knowledge and experience. The analysis focuses on two aspects: firstly, identifying the warning strategies that are expressed explicatory or implicitly and secondly on examining the verbal and nonverbal warning speech act.  Austin (1962) and Searle (1971)'s theoretical framework of Warning speech act have been used in the analysis of the data. The results and findings of the analysis show that Kurdish EFL participants can competently interact with the implicit and explicit speech act of warning in the selected social situations, as well as that warning strategy can impact the participants’ verbal, non-verbal communicative skills in their reactions.

Other findings show that Kurdish EFL participants use directness in expressing warning strategies in some situations, as well as indirectness in others. In the latter, the Kurdish participants develop politeness strategies in their answers to different situations in order to maintain a positive face to the addressees and help them not to face embarrassment.