Linguistic mitigating devices in American and Jordanian students' requests

The present study purports to examine the linguistic mitigation devices that Jordanian learners of English use when making requests in English, and to compare these devices with those used by the native speakers of American English in order to find out what linguistic mitigation knowledge Jordanian learners lack in their L2 and what factors influence their pragmatic request behavior. To achieve this purpose, a sample of 90 undergraduate students was normally selected from Jordanian and American universities to participate in the study. The data were selected through a specially designed questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Test (DCT). Findings from examining the speech acts of request data showed interesting differences in the structure of requestive acts, type, frequency, and linguistic realization utilized. The results also indicated that there are at least three factors influence the nonnative speakers' choices: language ability, L1 pragmatic knowledge, and L1 cultural norms transfer.