الفهرس 
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Abstract
This study aims to investigate the pragma-phonological features of some English speech acts as produced by native and nonnative speakers of American English.The study adopts the experimental(instrumental) approach to analyze the data. Its purpose is to investigate some speech acts uttered by Arabic and English speakers from a phonological perspective. The study focuses on exploring the prosodic features of the speech acts of apology, request and criticism in the subjects’ speech. To collect the data, participants were asked to respond to three sets of situations representing the three speech acts under investigation. The responses were recorded in MP3 format and fed into PRAAT for the purpose of analysis. However, the study does not cover all the prosodic features as it is limited to the analysis of intonation and its relation to pitch and stress.In addition to the acoustic analysis using PRAAT, a stage of auditory analysis is added to measure the credibility of the results obtained from the acoustic analysis. The results of the production experiment indicated that the nonnative speakers of English made significantly different changes in their pronunciation of English speech acts. However, it can be generalized that the intonation patterns of speech acts vary according to sentence structure, word choice, and intention of the speaker. The results also show that the errors Egyptians make in intonational patterns and stress placement can be recognized as a feature of nonnative production, and sometimes they affect comprehensibility and mutual understanding. It is also noticed that foreign accent is identified not only in the segmental level, but it could be recognized in the suprasegmental one. This means that if the speaker truly understands the intentions of the speech act s/he produces, the prosodic features accompanying articulation are expressive of the pragmatic function of a given speech act.
Key words: speech acts production – Intonation –pitch-intensity- request-apology-criticism.
This study aims to investigate the pragma-phonological features of some English speech acts as produced by native and nonnative speakers of American English.The study adopts the experimental(instrumental) approach to analyze the data. Its purpose is to investigate some speech acts uttered by Arabic and English speakers from a phonological perspective. The study focuses on exploring the prosodic features of the speech acts of apology, request and criticism in the subjects’ speech. To collect the data, participants were asked to respond to three sets of situations representing the three speech acts under investigation. The responses were recorded in MP3 format and fed into PRAAT for the purpose of analysis. However, the study does not cover all the prosodic features as it is limited to the analysis of intonation and its relation to pitch and stress.In addition to the acoustic analysis using PRAAT, a stage of auditory analysis is added to measure the credibility of the results obtained from the acoustic analysis. The results of the production experiment indicated that the nonnative speakers of English made significantly different changes in their pronunciation of English speech acts. However, it can be generalized that the intonation patterns of speech acts vary according to sentence structure, word choice, and intention of the speaker. The results also show that the errors Egyptians make in intonational patterns and stress placement can be recognized as a feature of nonnative production, and sometimes they affect comprehensibility and mutual understanding. It is also noticed that foreign accent is identified not only in the segmental level, but it could be recognized in the suprasegmental one. This means that if the speaker truly understands the intentions of the speech act s/he produces, the prosodic features accompanying articulation are expressive of the pragmatic function of a given speech act.
Key words: speech acts production – Intonation –pitch-intensity- request-apology-criticism.
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