A GENDER-BASED STUDY OF REQUEST SPEECH ACT REALIZATION PATTERNS OF PUNJABI SPEAKERS
Abdul Rafay Khan  and Ghazala Kausar 
ABSTRACT
Punjabi is the 11th most widely spoken language of the world. Its rich historical, cultural and literary background can be traced back in ancient oral and written literature of great Muslim Sufia e Karam, Hindu, and Sikh gurus. Although this language shares some universal aspects of realizing different speech acts, its speakers also rely on some patterns specific to this language. The present study aims to investigate the realization of request speech act patterns in Punjabi language speakers. The issue of universality has been a grave concern in the studies of speech acts. The study attempted to find out the level of directness in the speech patterns, identify different strategies adopted by the speakers, look for internal and external modification used to soften or mitigate the request patterns, and see the use of request perspectives and gender differences in realization of request speech acts by Punjabi speakers. For the study of Punjabi Speech acts, the framework is borrowed from CCSARP project of Blum-Kulka and Olshtain. The data has been collected from 30 participants (15 male and 15 female). A discourse completion test adopted by Blum-Kulka for the analysis of speech act patterns of native speakers and learners was used to collect data. The research revealed that speakers mostly relied on direct speech acts; however, the tendency of using indirect speech acts was more frequent in female speakers. In addition to this, female speakers applied more internal and external modification techniques, for softening the speech acts,than the male speakers.
KEY WORDS: Punjabi, Request speech acts, Strategies, Modification, Level of directness, Indirectness, CCSARP