Congratulations across Cultures: Punjabi and British Speakers

Punjabi and British Speakers

Abstract

The present study focuses on the
investigation of congratulation strategies
employed by Punjabi EFL learners as
compared to British English speaker’s in
the light of taxonomy of congratulation
speech acts proposed by Elwood (2004).
There were 120 speakers participated in
this study distributed into four different
groups: 30 British English speakers, 30
Punjabi EFL learners of Elite class, 30
Punjabi EFL learners of Middle class and
30 Punjabi EFL learners of the Lower
class. For the purpose of data collection,
two research tools were employed (a)
demographic informative questionnaire and
(b) a discourse completion test (DCT). The
data was analyzed by using raw frequency,
percentage and t-test of two independent
samples assuming unequal variance. The
findings of the study reveal that the most
frequently used types of congratulation
strategies were Initialism of Illocutionary
Force Indicating Device (IFID) followed by
overlapped strategies (combination of two).
The results showed that Punjabi EFL
learners’ usage of strategies was different
as compared to British English speakers in
the production of L2.