A metapragmatic analysis of the speech act of marriage in religious and legislative texts

Abstract EN

Family building is the quest of all humans that needs to be shed lights on since human relationships are the most important issues that could be analysed linguistically, religiously and legally.

Therefore, this study attempts to analyse metapragmatically the act of marriage in religious and legislative texts, namely, the Quranic and biblical texts and legislations of both Iraq and Britain.

The major aims of this study are to examine the metapragmatic factors that influence marriage in religious and legislative texts and compare between the two languages in terms of marriage metapragmatically in religious and legal laws.

The researcher uses a qualitative method of research to examine and describe the selected data in this study.

The model employed in this study is Searle's felicity conditions (1965) and classifications of speech acts (1975) to show the cross cultural differences of the same speech act.

The results of this study reveal that metapragmatic factors have essential role on affecting, performing and expressing marriage across religions and cultures.

It is also found that the same speech act is performed differently across cultures employing different felicity conditions.