The pragmatic implications of passivization proper in English and Arabic political discourse

Abstract EN

From a systemic perspective, the writer speaker's choice between the feature 'operative' (i.e., active voice: actor/agent as the theme of the complex clause in question)3, the feature 'receptive1 (i.e., passive voice: gal/affected as the theme of the same clause), and what the Arab grammarians’ and rhetoricians’ term 'surrogate subject' (n'ib 1-fil 4) which, according to 'atiq!974 serves various rhetorical fanctions/purposes are all pragmatically motivated.

This choice is made with the main intention of'hiding' the actual doer of the action, be it a deed or a mischief.

If it is 'surfaced', the actor/agent will be placed right at the end of the clause, the position of unmarked focus in Halliday's (1967& elsewhere) formulation, or even deleted if irrelevant (i.

e., if it can be recovered from context, or, according to Arab grammarians and rhetoricians, if it is well-known or unknown).

However, politicians and political writers have other pragmatic motivations, regarding this deletion which will be discussed in this paper.

The dilemma of thematising the goal/affected is that if it occupies the thematic slot of the clause, it may be counted as the actual doer by the writer/shaker, who implicitly tries to convince the reader/listener of his credibility, having made sure that the reader/hearer is, in turn, connotatively convinced that the referent of the promoted grammatical subject is the actual doer of the action.