The Intonation of Requesting in Arabic
Abstract
A request is an act of asking for something politely. The word "rajaa'n" and its derivatives: "arraja", "arjuu(k)", "yurja".etc, is an important marker of polite requests in Arabic. A request without this word may make it less like a request and perhaps less courteous and less polite. This paper aims at studying the meaning of "rajaa'n" in the light of its intonation. In other words how request utterances with "rajaa'n" are realized intonationally and how intonation adds an important dimension to the meaning of these request utterances.