A simple methodology for identifying speech act tendencies

Speech act studies often compare two or more groups of speakers by analyzing how often each group uses a given strategy to realize a speech act. Since the goal of such studies is to compare groups, they often do not discuss the variation that exists within the groups and, by extension, what can be considered a speech act tendency for a given group. To illustrate within-group variation and how such variation can be interpreted to identify the speech act tendencies of a group, this study used e-mail refusals of requests written by 50 native speakers of English as a case study. Data were collected using a discourse completion task and analyzed for participants’ strategies to refuse a request. Descriptive statistics show a considerable amount of variation in this rather homogenous group of English speakers but also allow for the identification of both commonly and rarely used refusal strategies. These findings highlight the importance of considering the commonly used strategies and the rarely used strategies when attempting to empirically identify speech act tendencies for teaching and assessment purposes. Implications of the results for future research, teaching, and assessment practices are discussed.