Commissive Speech Acts: Recognition and Use

Abstract

Iraqi EFL university students are frequently observed to confuse between a commissive act and other speech acts and further they yield inappropriate utterances of commissive which are not in conformity with the social and cultural standards and norms. Thus, the current paper tends to identify Iraqi students’ ability to recognize and produce illocutionary acts of promise, threat and guarantee. Forty Iraqi EFL students  in 4th year have been selected to represent the sample of the study; they have been exposed to a test of two phases: recognition and production. Responses to a two-phase test (recognition and production) have been assembled and investigated. The findings demonstrate that students find more difficulty in producing than in recognizing these acts. Their difficulty may be attributed certain factors: students’ unfamiliarity with these acts and their reliance on syntactic rather the pragmatic knowledge in handling these acts. Further, L1 interference in solving problems related to pragmatics is another factor.