Strategies of Rejection in "One Thousand and One Nights": A Pragmatic Historical Study

Abstract

Request is considered one of the directive speech acts that are frequently used in our daily life and at the same time, it is considered one of the face-threatening acts. The speakers of any language have special strategies for performing the request speech act on the one hand and ways to prevent threatening the Hearer's face on the other hand. This study, which is considered one of the historical pragmatic studies, attempts to uncover the request strategies and the internal and external modifiers used by the characters in the third volume of the book One Thousand and One Nights. In this research, which is based on a descriptive analytical approach, the researchers chose the Trosborg model (1995) to classify the request strategies and Alcón et al. (2005) to classify the internal and external modifiers. Regarding the request strategies, the imperative is the most commonly used strategy among the direct request strategies, as it is employed in speech by all three categories of speakers, but when used by speakers of lower status (compared to the listeners) it is preceded by prefixes such as oaths and polite verbs. Regarding the indirect method or hints, it is also one of the most commonly used strategies by all three categories. The hints include proverbs, interrogative sentences and declarative sentences. Regarding the internal modifying tools, the most commonly used tools are prefixes that include oaths and polite verbs, followed by hedging and understatements tools. As for external modifiers, grounders are the most commonly used, followed by the phrase “please” and the promise of a reward.