A pragmatic study of the speech act of criticizing in Mosuli Arabic with reference to English

Abstract EN

Although criticizing can sometimes be a face-threatening act, it is in fact a very important linguistic phenomenon in people’s daily communication.

The speech act of criticizing usually involves a constructive attitude that is performed by the speaker with the intention to improve the addressee’s works, sayings, actions, behaviours, etc.

This study aims at describing the speech act of criticizing in Mosuli Arabic, in addition to investigating the strategies of the speech act of criticizing employed by speakers of Mosuli Arabic of different ages in everyday situations.

The data of this study consists of 75 criticism utterances by males and 75 by females.

The corpus was transcribed, analysed and categorized basing on the adapted version of Nguyen’s (2005, 2013) model of criticism strategies.

The context of the utterances was taken into consideration because it has a considerable influence on the criticism strategies.

The study verifies the research hypothesis that Mosuli Arabic speakers tend to use indirect strategies more than direct ones when expressing criticism.

It is found that “asking/presupposing” strategy is the most used among other strategies.

The study reveals a new criticism strategy called “severe criticism”.

This strategy has not been identified by Nguyen, yet it is relevant to criticism.The present study additionally verifies the hypothesis that the speech act of criticizing in Mosuli Arabic is being realized by certain semantic and syntactic forms.

Finally, the study reveals that speakers of Mosuli Arabic use some mitigating devices to soften their criticism.

It shows that “subjectivizers” and “sweeteners” are the most used modifiers by the interactants.

Furthermore, politeness is achieved through the use of the politeness strategies: bald-on-record strategy, negative politeness strategy and off-record strategy.