Speech Act Analysis of Whatsapp Statuses Used by Jordanians

Abstract

This qualitative study aims at investigating the WhatsApp statuses as used by Jordanians. It also investigates the types of speech acts used in these statuses. For this purpose, the study has collected and analyzed 200 statuses. The population of the study included all English language students of Jadadra University, where the sample of the study included (50) students, representing 20 % of the whole population. The results showed that data were classified into six main topics; religious, social, political, personal, romantic and national. Additionally, five themes emerged from the data, namely, expressive, directive, assertive, commissive and declaration. Expressive speech acts represent (37 %) of the total speech acts types analyzed. The directive took the second place, representing (25%) of the total status update analyzed. The assertive and commisive fall into the third and fourth position representing (23%) and (15%) respectively. The declarative type has the no occurrences representing (0 %) of the analyzed data. Some of the recommendations suggested are that further research needs to be conducted into the speech acts used by Jordanians on different social networking platforms.