Mitigating requesting acts by deaf Jordanian adults

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the linguistic mitigating devices that deaf Jordanian adults use when making requests. To this end, a sample of 52 people (of whom 26 were hearing and 26 were deaf) was collected through a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). It was found that the two groups of participants showed variations in the way they structured their request acts and spelled them out. This was evident in the deaf group’s obvious underuse of certain request mitigation strategies and the lexico-grammatical items mapping them; in the absence of some strategies (i.e., sweetener, promise of reward, hint, and threat); and in the underassessment of social distance, relative power, and degree of imposition. This inappropriate use of requesting acts by deaf participants is attributed to their inadequate linguistic, pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic competence. The study concludes with some suggestions how to improve the Jordanian educational system for the deaf.