The Effect of Age and Position on Favor Asking

This study investigated the speech act of asking for a favor in Saudi Arabia. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of age and position in a favor asking etiquette. The researcher used a qualitative method to collect the data. The participants of this research were 51 female and 53 male high school students who were native speakers of Arabic in Saudi Arabia. The research tool was a questionnaire which was used to get the participants' reaction about a favor asking. This research was meant to find significant information about favor asking etiquette in KSA for males and females. The results showed that Saudi females and males are polite and indirect when they ask for a favor from their elders. The results also showed that most Saudi females and some of the Saudi males prefer to be indirect while asking a favor from their peers. Based on the results, a set of recommendations were made.

Cross-cultural testing of face threats to predict apology and thanks intentions

We examined whether Koreans intended to make an apology and North Americans intended to express thanks in a message asking for a favor. Because one reason for apologizing or thanking is to lessen the face threat occurred by favor asking, four face threats were empirically measured to predict participants' intentions. Participants were 104 North American and 90 Korean college students who took the role of an email sender making a favor request and selected from options for apologizing or thanking the receiver to lessen the four types of face threat. Results showed that North Americans intended to express thanks, and both North Americans and Koreans intended to make an apology when asking a favor; further, for Koreans, a speaker's positive face threat triggered intention to make an apology and, for North Americans, a receiver's negative face threat triggered an intention to express thanks. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

Persian favor asking in formal and informal academic contexts

The investigation of speech acts has been of interest, especially in cross-cultural pragmatics, to many L1/L2 researchers for many years (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989). Favor-asking, as an important speech act, is centered upon having the other party of conversation do a specific act (Goldschmidt 1999). Although some research has been done on favor-asking in different contexts, studies on this speech act are still scarce, if any, in Persian settings. The main thrust of the current study was to investigate favor-asking among a sample of 20 native speakers of Persian (10 women and 10 men). The participants were selected from graduate students, since the employed oral DCT scenarios were designed to elicit favors asked from three different academic statuses: Higher, equal, and lower (professors, peers, and students, respectively). A total of 240 responses were then analyzed to identify the recurring patterns under the three open-coded categories of pre-favor, favor, and post-favor. The examination of the responses illustrated some variation triggered by gender and academic status differences, namely, the length of favors, frequency of some (sub)themes, and formality degree. Additionally, some relevant syntactic issues were explored (e.g. plural/singular pronouns/verbs), which contributed to the formality/informality of the favors, depending upon the contexts in which they were incorporated. Finally, some insights into Persian sociocultural interactions, favor-asking in particular, were provided.

International Sugar Council

A meeting of a committee of the International Sugar Council was scheduled to open in London, September 29, 1952. The major question to be considered by the committee was the distribution of the world's sugar supply, in particular, the surplus accumulated in Cuba as a result of a record harvest. Many members of the organization were said to feel that a general reassessment of the marketing methods of sugar was needed in view of changed conditions of production. Some delegates were reported to favor asking the United Nations to convene a world sugar conference; it was pointed out that the principal obstacle to successful distribution of the world sugar supply was the lack of international convertibility of currencies. France, Belgium, Netherlands, United Kingdom, German Federal Republic, Peru, Haiti, Cuba, United States, and Indonesia were expected to send delegates to the meeting while observers were expected from Brazil, Mexico, Poland and Czechoslovakia.