As cultures are mainly divided into collectivistic and individualistic, members tend to emphasize, through communication, either their position as part of their group or their independence from the group. This emphasis is manifested in using the pragmatic concepts of positive politeness and negative politeness. The present study looks into the reflection of these two cultures in Rockstar’s renowned video game, Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). It aims at identifying the two cultures as present in the game and showing their significance to its narrative. It fills the gap in the studies of language used within video games as well as its cultural reflections. The study addresses the following question: What are the positive and negative politeness strategies used in Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), and what are the implications of using these strategies in its narrative? By adopting Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, the researcher analyzed the positive and negative politeness used in the scripted dialogue of the in-game cutscenes through the mixed methods approach. The researcher hypothesized that the protagonist shows adherence to a collectivistic culture using positive politeness, and he begins transitioning towards an individualistic culture using negative politeness. The results showed that 75% of the protagonist’s interactions contained positive politeness while only 25% contained negative politeness. This transition explains the protagonist’s loss of trust and loyalty to his group as he begins to witness the futility of maintaining such loyalty. It also supports the overall narrative of the game as well as its cultural foundations.
This paper aims at studying the illocutionary speech acts: direct and indirect to show the most dominant ones in a presidential speech delivered by the USA president. The speech is about the most critical health issue in the world, COVID-19 outbreak. A descriptive qualitative study was conducted by observing the first speech delivered by president Trump concerning coronavirus outbreak and surveying the illocutionary acts: directive, declarative, commissive, expressive, and representative. Searle's (1985) classification of illocutionary speech acts is adopted in the analysis.
What are the main types of the illocutionary speech acts performed by Trump in his speech?; Why does
... Show MoreRacism changes its meaning, shape, purpose or function according to various factors such as time, place, motives, and backgrounds; among others. It seems, however, to have deep roots back in the history of mankind. Such a concept stems from a perceived difference with the other. It is fed by the feeling of being hierarchically superior in opposition to another party that is depicted as inferior. Since ancient times, racism is disguised in different forms and manifests itself on various levels. It is a truism that this ideology can be best presented via language.
Due to its negative implication, racism lends itself to a critical kind of research. As such, this paper is a critical pragmatic investigation for this phenomenon a
... Show MoreThe present study investigates the use of intensifiers as linguisticdevices employed by Charles Dickens in Hard Times. For ease of analysis, the data are obtained by a rigorous observation of spontaneously occurring intensifiers in the text. The study aims at exploring the pragmatic functions and aesthetic impact of using intensifiers in Hard Times.The current study is mainly descriptive analytical and is based on analyzing and interpreting the use of intensifiers in terms ofHolmes (1984) andCacchiani’smodel (2009). From the findings, the novelist overuses intensifiers to the extent that 280 intensifiers are used in the text. These intensifiers(218) are undistinguished
... Show MorePablo Neruda's artistic distinctiveness can be considered in two ideas or attitudes of romanticism. First, the imagination, which is the result of conduct and spirituality, and second, the individualism, which is a collection of mysterious mysteries from the texts of individuality based on philosophical sonnets. His collection of poems points out the ethereality and indescribability of life, employing the reality of life at the level of human perception in a symbolic language. In other words, Pablo Neruda recreates the meanings in poetry through the three ideas of reduction, interpretation, and analysis. "What is the essential connection between individualism and the symbolic language of Pablo Neruda's imagination and What are the reason
... Show MoreIt is axiomatic that languages mirror the world view of their users. Manipulating honorific forms among people inevitably reflects this truth . Honorifics are conventionalized forms or expressions manifested in all the world's languages and are used to express the social status of the participants in the verbal interaction and to convey indications like politeness and respect . English is no exception. However the question is what exactly creates these forms and their meanings. Although honorifics have been extensively researched from a grammatical and semantic angle , yet they haven’t received that significant attention i
... Show Moreإنّ التّأمّل في الدّراسات الأدبيّة النّقديّة الحديثة الّتي تنظر إلى النّصّ أنّه لوحة تتشكّل من مجموعة تداخلات نصّيّة سابقة للنصّ المُنتج أو مُعاصرة له، تدفع القارئ إلى الغوص في أعماق النّصوص وتحليلها والكشف عن الآليّات والإجراءات الّتي اعتمدت في إنتاجه، وإظهار الجماليّات الفنّيّة التي شكلت في مُجملها كائنا حيّا يُعبّر عن حالات إنسانيّة مُستمرة الحدوث رغم تقادم الأزمان.
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... Show MoreWith the increasing rates of cancer worldwide, a great deal of scientific discourse is devoted to arguments and statements about cancer and its causes. Scientists from different fields try to seize any available chance to warn people of the risk of consuming and exposing to carcinogens that have, unfortunately, become essential parts of modern life. The present paper attempts to investigate the proximization strategy through which scientists construct carcinogen risk to enhance people’s preventive actions against these carcinogens. The paper targets the construction which depends on producing the conflict between the values of the people themselves and the contrasting values assigned to carcinogens. To achieve this aim, Cap’s (2
... Show MoreDeixes belong to the field of both semantics and pragmatics as they lie in the edge of these two fields. Pragmatically, they are concerned with the relationship between the structure of a language and the contexts. The present work aims at analyzing the use of deixes using Levinson’s (1983) and Yule's (1996) concept of deixes, where the latter maintained that the referents of the deixes cannot be realized apart from the context where they are used. He added that the contextual information of certain utterances involves information about the participants (the speaker and the addressee), the time and the place. Consequently, a qualitative- descriptive approach has been adopted to meet the objective of the study which reads, “exam
... Show MoreThis research is an attempt to explore a social and pragmatic phenomenon of lamentation in elegies of Gray and AL-Khansaa' who represent two different cultures. It illustrates the intended meaning of lamentation in English and Arabic and finds how the two languages express this purpose of poetry by analysing it socio-pragmatically adopting Searle's models (1969),and its modifications. Lamentation is considered as a mournful poem lamenting the death of whole humanity as Gray's elegy and of an individual as AL-Khansaa's elegy. So, Gray portrays a universal picture concerning his lamentation, while AL-Khansaa' portrays an individual and subjective picture regarding her lamentation. As branches of linguistics, sociolinguistics de
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