PROMISE AND THREAT IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC RELIGIOUS TEXTS: A PRAGMATIC TUDY | ||
| AL-AMEED JOURNAL | ||
| Article 1, Volume 1, Issue 1, April 2012, Pages 9-104 | ||
| Author | ||
| RIYADH TARIQ KADHIM AL-AMEEDI | ||
| Abstract | ||
| 1- The analysis shows that the SAs of promising and threatening in both English and Arabic can be applied to religious texts by analyzing their FCs. This means that religious texts can be regarded as acts of communication. 2- It has been found that in most cases of English texts, the performative verbs of promising are expressed implicitly by the modal verbs ‘will’ and ‘shall’ as well as the conditional form; while in Arabic texts promising is expressed explicitly as well as implicitly by different lexical, semantic, and pragmatic forms. Thus one can conclude that the SA of promising is performed more explicitly in Arabic texts than in English. 3- The study shows also that the SA of promising in Arabic culture does not always imply a commitment to do something to the H, as in English culture. Thus it can be used for the purpose of terminating the conversation between the participants, and to satisfy cultural expectations or to save face. 4- As for the performative verb of threatening, the analysis shows that in both languages threat is mainly expressed implicitly by different syntactic and semantic forms. This fact reveals that both languages have a similar point of view as to the implicit nature of the A of threatening. 5- The study finds out also that threat in both English and Arabic cannot only be determined by the declarative form since it can be expressed in more than one structure such as imperative, prohibitive, and interrogative. 6- Concerning the tense of the performative verbs of promising and threatening, English and Arabic are different in using the performative verbs. The study reveals that English performative verbs of these two acts can be expressed only by using the present tense; while Arabic tends to use the present or/and the past tense. Moreover, Arabic can use some past verbs to express a promise or a threat in given contexts. 7- The study has arrived at a significant conclusion that both acts of promising and threatening have been found to be closely related in both languages since the A of threatening is derived from the same illocution, i.e., promising. It is also concluded that both acts can share some FCs and some syntactic forms. The differences between the two languages behind using the formula ‘I promise you’ to express a threat can be attributed to the following points: a-English tends to avoid using the formula ‘I threaten you’ by a euphemistic formula ‘I promise you’ owing to the fact that this formula of threatening is rarely accepted as a performative and has a pragmatic restriction or an offensive meaning in English culture. b-Arabic tends to use the performative verb ‘ وعد ’ (promise) to express a threat since it has the strongest degree of commitment of the S, and to emphasize the degree of punishment in a metaphorical way. | ||
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