ABSTRACT
at the beginning of this article, American students of Arabic may respond to a compliment given by a native-speaker of Arabic by saying Shukran. If the intent of the American, drawing from his or her L1 strategies, is to respond in an appropriately polite manner and if the native Arabic speaker interprets the force of the utterance differently (e.g. that Speaker2 wants to end the conversation), pragmalinguistic failure has occurred. To avoid this type of misunderstanding, it is important that Arabic as a second language students learn the more extended kinds of Arabic responses illustrated in this study.
