3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies – Vol 24(1): 69 – 83 http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2018-2401-06 69 Alerters in Malay and English Speech Act of Request: A Contrastive Pragmatics Analysis MARLYNA MAROS Sustainability of Language Sciences Research Center Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia marlyna@ukm.edu.my NURUL SYAFAWANI HALIM Universiti Teknologi Mara, Seremban, Malaysia ABSTRACT This study focuses on the speech act of requests, specifically on the alerters. An ‘alerter’ refers to the discourse feature used in initiating a conversation or the getting attention of the hearer. Request as a speech act is much investigated for its Head Acts and Supportive Moves, however, alerter as one of its initial discourse features has not been much looked into. In the context of contrastive pragmatics study on the Malay language in Malaysia, the study of alerters in request has yet to be explored. Hence, the aim of this study is as follows: 1 - to classify the Malay categories of alerters by Malaysian Malay speakers, and 2 – to compare them with alerters in the English language. The participants consist of 400 native speakers’ of Malays from a central city and a rural area, aged between 12 to 56 years old, and varied in social backgrounds. The data was collected via Discourse Completion Task within a span of 3 months, and also coded and analysed using the framework of Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) by Blum-Kulka & Olshtain (1984). The findings revealed 10 categories of alerters by Malay speakers. The findings also indicated similarities and differences in the categories of Malay alerters and English alerters which could be the result of intercultural fusion in the sociopragmatis of doing requests within English, and the languages in Malaysia with the Malay language. Keywords: Alerters; English Requests; Malay Requests; Sociopragmatics competence; contrastive pragmatics INTRODUCTION ALERTER is one of the major sociopragmatic aspects at the stage of initiating a conversation. The term refers to the language used in initiating a conversation or the way of choosing the form of calls following the rules and the norms which are based on several social variables including age, social status, social distance and context of the utterance (Savic 2014, Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Whilst there are many kinds of speech acts such as apologies, complaints, and advices, this paper focuses on the speech act of request, specifically, on the alerters used by the person doing the act of request. Unlike many other researches on requests that chose to analyse its Head Act and Supportive Move, this research chose to focus on the Alerters, i.e, the first segment of the act. The reason for the study is to venture into a linguistic feature that is less studied yet makes a difference to the quality of interaction, in this case, a request. To make a request, the locution of request must be an act done by the speaker, which pragmatically means that the speaker requested for the effects of that particular action. The expected effect or perlocution, is that the hearer wants to do the action and the way a request is accomplished is by getting the hearer to do the action. Moreover, a speaker needs to be aware not only for the attempt of the request itself, but also of the culturally appropriate ways of alerting the request. Requests need to be carefully expressed in order to attain the compliance of the hearer and the gratification of the speaker’s desire. For the request to be a successful attempt, the speaker and hearer must be able to comprehend each other, such as by taking turns in adjacent pairs of doing requests