Real Estate Offers in Jordan: A Representative-Directive Speech Act

Abstract

This study examines Jordanian Arabic Real Estate Offers (henceforth JAREOs) on the open market website. It aims at presenting an appropriate taxonomy of linguistic realization patterns pertaining to the speech act of offering. In this regard, an exact definition of this particular speech act should be provided. The taxonomy, which is based on the basis of two theoretical frameworks, viz. speech acts and politeness theory, will be presented. To achieve the goal of this study, data were selected from the above-mentioned website. The 20 real estate offers were analyzed in a qualitative-quantitative method, so the data were tabulated and calculated in order to find out if there were striking statistical differences among the offering linguistic patterns. The analysis has revealed that JAREOs belonging to a new type of offers; investment offers are a hybrid speech act combining representative and directive illocutionary acts, and they are subcategorized only under conventionally direct offers. It has also been revealed that the elliptical utterances are the most frequent pattern in representatives while in directives, gerunds are the most frequent one in Jordanian Arabic real estate offers. It is hoped that this study extends the scope of speech act research in advertising discourse.