Refusing Invitations: A Contrastive Pragmatic Study of Jordanian Arabic and Castilian Spanish

Objectives: The study aimed at examining the use of refusals by Jordanian Arabic and Castilian Spanish speakers when declining invitations from their friends, focusing on similarities and differences in terms of head strategies, adjuncts, order, and frequency. Methods: A discourse completion task (DCT) comprising various situations were designed to elicit refusals from the participants. Drawing on Beebe et al’s categorization (1990), the data were categorized into head acts (subdivided into direct and indirect strategies) and adjuncts to refusal. Results: Although the Jordanian and Spanish participants belong to two distant cultures (eastern and western), the findings revealed that they were more similar than different in their refusals. They both showed a stronger tendency for indirectness in refusing invitations, with the Jordanians being more indirect. Both groups commonly utilized the strategies of statement of regret, giving reason, and negative ability, with different degrees of preference and frequency. As for adjuncts, both groups were inclined to employ a high percentage of adjuncts either before or after head strategies of refusal. While the Jordanians preferred the adjuncts of gratitude and swearing, the Spanish participants preferred gratitude and positive opinion. Both groups showed predilection to combine the same typical components in their refusal responses but differ in the order in which these components appeared. The employment of indirect refusal strategies and adjuncts in the Jordanian and Spanish responses pragmatically served to mitigate potentially negative effects of refusal on the inviters. Conclusion: Further research on Jordanian and Spanish refusals in other situations is recommended.