In his masterpiece ’The Prophet’, Kahlil Gibran presents his unwavering faith and passionate belief in the healing power of universal love that brings humans to sublime ideas and elevates their souls and behavior. The current study aims to find out the stylistic devices utilized to represent the concept of love based on the hypothesis that Gibran tends to use certain stylistic effects to convey his meaning. The study adopts Leech and Short’s (2007) framework of stylistic analysis to analyze the lexical items and figures of speech in selected extracts from the book. The findings reveal that Gibran prefers concrete nouns, dynamic verbs, and physical adjectives over abstract nouns, stative verbs, and psychological adjectives to s

This study shows impoliteness as a form of face-threatening that can be intentionally caused by verbal threats in a particular setting. It investigates: what strategies and mitigators do Iraqi-Kurdish English as a foreign language (EFL) learners use in situations of threat responses? The present investigation paper aims to examine impoliteness strategies and mitigators by these learners when they respond to threatening situations in their context. Thus, it fills a gap in pragmatics literature by investigating the reactions to threats in an Iraqi-Kurdish EFL context. To this end, 50 participants have participated in this study. An open-ended questionnaire in the form of a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) is used to elicit responses fr

Giving advice refers to an attempt by the speaker to express what the addressee should do in a particular situation or what is good for him/her. It is also a feature of making social relations and communications move smoothly and become stronger. The current study aims to investigate the strategies of the speech act of advice by old females and males for the younger generation in written signs. Comparison is made between old females and males regarding their pragmatic use of advice and the way they are manifested in expressing gender identity differences. The sample of the study consists of (30) written signs of advice divided equally between the two gender groups. Hinkel’s (1997) classification of the strategies for perceiving th

<p>The speech act of request is face-threatening by nature and an inappropriate request can cause offence to the hearer, particularly when s/he has higher authority (Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2011). E-mail is frequently used to facilitate communication between student and professor in Iraq. Iraqi EFL (English as a foreign language) learners face pragmatic difficulty in making proper requests to individuals of higher authority via e-mail. Some studies have been conducted on Arab EFL learners to uncover the pragmatic behaviour of these learners in real-life requests using elicited data. This research fills a gap in Inter-language Pragmatics (ILP) literature in that it investigates the use of academic request in three diverse imposi

The dramatic series on television have a great impact on people’sattitudes towards dialects of language varieties, by relating theconceptual pictures or prototypes presented by series’ characters tothose dialects. This study aims to show the influence of TV series onIraqi university learners’ gender and age in relating positive ornegative semantic qualities to their dialects. To this end, 150 Iraqi EFLlearners have participated in this study to examine their attitudestowards Baghdadi, Mousli and Nasiriya dialects. The data arecollected by Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, Fillenbaum's (1960)matched guise technique and then labeled by Willmorth’s (1988)subjective reaction test. A structured interview is conducted to supportthe data

        Criticism, as an evaluative criterion, is a significant speech act for English language learners to improve their speech and actions in their academic life. Yet, it is realized differently across diverse cultures. Few studies have shown that the linguistics forms of one language are different from those available in another language. Hence, this study aims to investigate the cross-cultural similarities and differences between 60 Iraqi and Malay university learners in the use of criticism strategies. The data are collected using a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and a Focus Group Interview (FGI). The data are coded based on Nguyen’s (2005) coding scheme of criticism in terms of the realization strategies. Qualitative

Fallacies are incorrect reasoning that make an argument seem less logically credible and easier to be identified as unsound. They are widespread; individuals commit them while engaging in various activities, including at work, at home, while creating advertisements, and in the media. This study aims to investigate the rhetorical strategies accompanied with producing the fallacious arguments selected from the American Film “12 Angry Men (1957)”. The study adopts Damer’s (2009) model for the identification of fallacy. As for rhetorical analysis, the study adopts Aristotle’s triangle of rhetoric and McGuigan’s (2007) taxonomy of rhetorical devices. The results uncover that the most violated criteria are relevance, acceptabili

The present paper aims at investigating the linguistic image portrayed by UNICEF reports on the Iraqi child from a critical discourse analysis perspective during Covid19 pandemic (2020). The paper attempts to fill a gap in research literature concerning the linguistic construction of the Iraqi child by the UNICEF reports during the critical health crisis of Covid19. Van  Leeuwen’s (2008) approach of social actor representation has been adopted for this purpose. From Van  Leeuwen’s approach, the category of determination (single determination and overdetermination) has been selected to be the main analytical tool for its high compatibility with the set of objectives put forward to figure out how such a globally effective and

This study aims to reveal the similarities and differences between Iraqi and Malay university learners and their genders in producing the supportive moves of criticism. To this end, 30 Iraqi and 30 Malay university learners have participated in this study. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and a Focus Group Interview (FGI) are conducted to elicit responses from the participants. Nguyen’s (2005) classification of criticism supportive moves is adapted to code the data. The data are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Overall, the findings unveil that both groups use similar categories of supportive moves, but Iraqis produce more of these devices than Malays in their criticisms. Although both females and males of both groups use id

<div><p><em>This study investigates the use of the speech act of request by </em><em>Iraqi EFL (English as a foreign language) learners </em><em>in student-professor e-mail communication. It aims to examine request strategies and internal modifications in academic requests in e-mail. There has been little investigation of the issue of an academic request made by Arab EFL learners to a higher status person via an authentic data. Thus, this study intends to provide more investigation of the strategies and internal modifiers that are produced by Iraqi EFL learners when they interact with their professors via e-mail. However, this study adapts the CCSARP (cross-cultural speech act realization pr