Investigating Request between Iraqi Postgraduate Students and MAIN LIBRARY Employees in UPM

Human language plays a pivotal role in our life. It is most natural means of communication through which we can both convey and comprehend different messages. It is claimed that our inability to understand the people’s intentions is the result of our misunderstanding about them Thomas (1983). In our mother tongue and our culture, we face little or no difficulty in employing words because we have unconsciously learnt to follow the norms and conventions of our speech acts. The successful communication is when a speaker uses politeness expressions in performing requests. Politeness is defined by Brown and Levinson (1987; 65) as “saying and doing things in such a way as to take into account the other person’s feeling”. Besides, Lakoff (1975: 33) refers “to be polite is saying the socially correct things.” Politeness is described by Leech (1983) in terms of costs and benefits for both speaker and hearer. Furthermore, when politeness expressions are utilized in performing requests, hearer’s positive face is maintained. For instance, “excuse me” or “would you mind”, these phrases are used by a speaker to refer to polite speech before stating the request. In other words, hearer is treated in the manner which speaker wants him/herself to be treated. Brown and Levinson (1987) further came up with a term FTA which claims that every utterance is potentially face threatening. They particularly described the acts as “…run contrary to the face wants of the addressee and/or of the speaker” (1987: 323). The increase of politeness degree is possible as suggested by Leech (1983) when indirect illocutions are more used: “(a) because they increase the degree of optionality, and (b) because the more indirect illocution is, the more diminished and tentative its force tends to be” (1983: 131-32). Besides, the higher levels of politeness may be produced by the higher levels of indirectness. Along with Brown and Levinson (1987) and Leech (1983), impolite and face-threatening may be produced or represented by direct requests because they intrude in the addressee’s territory as well as these authors claimed that the more using in directness seems to be politely in behavior. Hence, the reduction of the threat and the avoidance of danger of losing face come from using indirectness by speaker to smooth the conversation interaction. As Searle’s observation (1975) shows that the relationship between indirectness and politeness is “politeness is the most prominent motivation for preferring indirectness in requests, and certain forms tend to become the conventionally polite ways of making indirect requests” (1975: 76). The concept of directness, indirectness and politeness play an essential function in the negotiation of face during the realization of speech acts such as requests. According to Brown and Levinson (1987), “requests are intrinsically face threatening because they are intended to threaten the addressee’s negative face (i.e., freedom of action and freedom from imposition)”. Searle (1969) claims that illocutionary acts are classified into (i.e., representatives, directives, expressive, commissive, and declarations). A request is represented by the second category ‘directives’ as referred by Searle (1969) as "an attempt to get hearer to do an act which speaker wants hearer to do, and which it is not obvious that hearer will do in the normal course of events or of hearer's own accord" (1969: 66). Moreover, understanding the request is related with linguistic strategies, for instance, on record (most direct, e.g. ‘shut up’ when is said to a hearer directly), or off record (indirect, e.g. hints), the speaker might reach to the compromise by using an indirect request. Thus, politeness plays a crucial role in the negotiation of face during the realization of speech acts such as requests. This study attempts to find out the request strategies which employed by Iraqi students, and to explore the reason behind of employing these strategies by them. The study makes use of natural data and semi-structured interview to answer the research questions. The participants are Iraqi students who study in University Putra Malaysia (UPM). The importance of the study is to give knowledge about strategies of request that used by Iraqi students to avoid misunderstanding when communication.