Are Speech Acts Universal or Culture and Language – Specific?
Speech acts have been claimed by some to operate by universal pragmatic principles (Austin, (1962), Searle (1969, 1975), Brown & Levinson (1978)). Others have shown them to vary in conceptualization and verbalization across cultures and languages (Wong, 1994; Wierzbicka, 1985). Although this debate has generated over three decades of research, only the last 15 years marked a shift from an intuitively based approach to an empirically based one, which has focused on the perception and production of speech acts by learners of a second or foreign language (in the most cases, English as a second or foreign language, i.e., ESL and EFL) at varying stages of language proficiency and in different social interactions (Cohen, 1996, p. 385). Blum Kulka et. al., (1989) argue that there is a strong need to complement theoretical studies of speech acts with empirical studies, based on speech acts produced by native speakers of individual languages in strictly defined contexts. The illocutionary choic
