A comparative Analysis of apology Speech acts between American English and Iraqi Kurdish

Abstract

The present study is a comparative analysis of apology speech acts in both native speakers of Kurdish and native speakers of American English. It aims at finding out the similarities and differences in the strategies used to apologize in both languages. Therefore, a Discourse completion Task (DCT) questionnaire consisted of 15 situations was used to collect the data from 50 native speakers of English and 50 native speakers of Kurdish language. The findings revealed that both languages used similar five main strategies to apologize which confirm the universality of speech acts. However, the differences came out in the use of sub-strategies of an explicit expression of apology; native speakers of English used more an expression of regret strategy to perform an apology while native speakers of Kurdish used offer of an apology strategy more to apologize. Furthermore, the differences occurred in the frequency of strategies used to apologize in both languages. The study also revealed the occurrence of other new strategies in Kurdish Language that did not exist in English languag