Interrogative Sentences as Indirect Speech Acts in Arabic and English: A Contrastive Study

This study endeavours to provide a contrastive analysis of English and Arabic regarding the use of interrogative sentences as indirect speech acts. It is concerned with offering an account of how similar and different Arabic and English interrogative sentences are with respect to their use as indirect speech acts. Furthermore, this study aims at finding out the extent to which Arabic and English interrogative sentences are used in pragmatics to indicate indirectness.
 In this respect, it is hypothesized that both Arabic and English languages indirectly make use of interrogatives to carry out a variety of pragmatic functions. It is also hypothesized that different and various types of interrogative sentences in both English as well as Arabic express different instead of identical speech acts.
 Thus, a contrastive analysis of representative examples from both languages has been conducted with a demonstrably successful application of Speech Act Theory as a model of analysis. The study has proved its hypotheses and has shown noticeable differences and similarities between English and Arabic interrogative sentences with respect to the indirect speech acts and functions performed.