A speech acts of contrasting in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter : a pragmatic approach \

الملخص EN

This study deals with a very vital topic which is speech act of contrast in one of the most famous writers in the theater of the absurd; Harold Pinter in his play The Dumb Waiter.

The best this theory can be defined with is the title of Austin’s book “How to Do Things with Words.” This theory is developed by both Austin and Searle whom their own model of classification will be part of the practical side the text will be analyzed by.

Grice’s four maxims will go hand in hand with Austin’s and Searle’s to scrutinize the text.

In other words, two mixed methods will be adopted to analyze the text: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative means the way through which the text is analyzed to discover the principal of contrast resulted in the speech utterances.

Besides, quantitative deals with the percentage of the data resulted from the qualitative method.