Offers are widely common speech acts ranging from everyday communications to commercials. They constitute a crucial role in Jordanian culture. However, Jordanian Arabic offers have not been examined in a complex way.
In order to address these unanswered problems, the current research work takes a threefold (theoretical, empirical and comparative) perspective. First, the theoretical perspective of the research work focuses on the description of offers based on the former theoretical observations and the empirical research results, then outlines the potential arrangement of offer characteristics based on the two concepts ‘salience’ and ‘performance’ from a Jordanian Arabic perspective.
The second perspective of the research work involves the empirical investigation of three corpora of Jordanian Arabic offers. In order to carry out the empirical research, data are collected from three different sources: 100 ads extracted from Facebook that were posted by Jordanian agencies of travel and tourism, 100 ads extracted from ‘Open Market’ website that were posted by individual owners or agents of real estates, and a DCT consisting of 10 situations distributed to 100 Jordanian Arabic citizens. The data composing of the three corpora are analyzed in a qualitative-quantitative method, so data are calculated and tabulated in order to help find all the nuances in the offer strategies along with their linguistic patterns as well as politeness modification strategies. Since the analysis of Jordanian Arabic offers is still very much in its infancy, two linguistic taxonomies are constructed in order to organize the process of the data analysis for both written and spoken offers.
The results of the data analysis explore the notable role of the Jordanian culture not only in determining the offer strategy but also in choosing the politeness modification strategy. Direct offers were found to be the most frequently familiar offer strategy in the three corpora. On the one hand, politeness strategies in both corpora of Facebook and Open Market were used differently based on the platform of ads and the offered object. On the other hand, politeness modifications in the spoken corpus were microscopically examined and then detected that the preference of politeness modification strategy draws upon the offeree’s socio-cultural variables as age, social status, and gender. As a consequence, the current research offers a challenge to the face-saving model of politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) as it neglected two important variables regarding age and gender through which the degree of politeness can be assessed from a Jordanian Arabic perspective.
The third perspective compares the findings concerning written offers to those of spoken offers. The results of the comparison between the three corpora have explored some similarities and differences between the three corpora, which in turn, contribute to arrive at the four principal conclusions of the work: Jordanian Arabic offers are face-enhancing as well as face-threatening acts that are realized either directly or indirectly, Jordanian Arabic direct offers are more popular in use than their indirect counterparts, and politeness in Jordanian Arabic offers is related to the phenomenon of persuasion.