How to Do Things With Words

語用論(Pragmatics)を考える

Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education

Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket. Gordon Mathews. New York: Routledge, 2000. 228 pp.

Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket

Introduction to Sociolinguistics, I: The Sociolinguistics of Society

Motivating emotions is a critical factor in empowering students to manage the troubles they might face. Educational organizations pay great efforts to employ all the available means that can motivate their students for better learning from early stages until universities or institutes levels. The administrations of some universities and institutes, especially in the United States of America, do not stop there and pay more attention on motivating their students at the graduation parties on how to manage future businesses and challenges. This study explores how commencement speakers utilize success stories pragma-rhetorically to motivate the graduates to behave wisely to take future decisions. It investigates the pragmatic-rhetorical strategies in the motivational storytelling that is delivered within commencement speeches at American universities and institutes. It aims to recognize and analyze these strategies that commencement speakers employ as strategic strategies in presenting their stories to achieve their motivational purposes.  More specifically, it explores how speech acts, rhetorical tropes, conversational implicatures, and rhetorical appeals are used and distributed in the storytelling discourse. To this end, the researchers selected ten commencement speeches delivered by American commencement speaker.

Investigating pragma-rhetorical strategies utilized by American commencement speakers to motivate graduates for managing future opportunities and challenges

This study is concerned with the pragmatic aspects in American Christian sermons by White-American and African-American preachers. The study aims at detecting the noticeable differences between preachers in terms of the pragmatic strategies and tracing the social variable of ethnicity. The data under scrutiny are selected from official websites in forms of videos transcribed by the researchers and then analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The two types of analysis help the study to arrive at a variety of conclusions, the most central of which is there are considerable differences between the White-American and African-American preachers regarding their use of the pragmatic strategies. It also concludes that the social variable of ethnicity affects the African-American preachers more than their counterpart.

/pdf/ethnicity-and-the-pragmatic-strategies-in-american-christian-ce4ebhp92w.pdf

Ethnicity and the Pragmatic Strategies in American Christian Sermons

This study investigates selected scenes extracted from the American sitcom of 'Still Standing'. It answers the questions: what is the most common type of speech acts used in the sitcom of 'Still Standing', how is the inappropriateness of a speech act in relation to its context causes humour?, and what is the most common technique of using humour in interaction used in the selected sitcom. This study explores how humour is generated because of the inappropriateness of speech acts in relation to their contexts. The study focuses on the aspects of the humorous language, pragmatic context of humour, and speech act theory. Humour is considered in this study as resulting from the inappropriateness of speech acts in relation to their contexts. The study tries to find out how humour is generated in some selected scenes. The findings of the study provide an outline of the functions of humour in the American sitcom of 'Still Standing'

https://journals.ju.edu.jo/DirasatHum/article/download/105059/10596

The Humourous Effect of the Inappropriateness of Speech Acts in the Sitcom of Still Standing

This paper deals with the process of domestication of English expressions as a sociolinguistic phenomenon. It aims to explore the reasons of domesticating foreign [English] expressions that are variously acculturated within such social variables as gender, age, and social status. A modified sociolinguistic interview has been conducted to take the most frequently domesticated expressions in order to be included in a questionnaire administered to different sample of the Iraqi-Najafi Arabic speakers. The questionnaire is used to support the interview in fulfilling the aims of the research. Throughout the discussions, certain conclusions have been observed. English expressions are domesticated as a strategy of globalization and Englishization. Another considerable conclusion is that females have used domesticated expressions as a way to show prestige and acculturation.

/pdf/domestication-of-english-expressions-used-by-iraqi-arabic-12gsyubkgi.pdf

Domestication of English Expressions Used by Iraqi Arabic Speakers: A Sociolinguistic Study

Negative symptoms in schizophrenia are commonly associated with reductions and difficulties in patients' social skills. Fortunately, many psychosocial interventions recommended for their improvement. The aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of social skills enhancement training program on negative symptoms among patients with schizophrenia. Subjects: a convenience sample of 60 patients with schizophrenia who attended both inpatient department and the outpatient clinic, of department of neuropsychiatry Tanta University hospital. Study design: Quasi-experimental research design was utilized. Settings: department of neuropsychiatry Tanta University Hospital. Study tools: Two tools were used: tool 1 is "Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS)" and Tool 2 is "Social skills assessment screening scale". Results: there were reductions in the mean scores of negative symptoms domains and a significant increase in the mean scores of social skills domains, immediately and at one month after the program in comparison with before. There was a highly statistical significant negative correlation between levels of social skills and levels of negative symptoms Conclusions: it can be concluded that, the social skills enhancement training program was effective for patients with schizophrenia and brought a significant decrease in the severity of negative symptoms, and an improvement in their social skills in comparison to before the program. Recommendations: the researcher recommended that social skills training program should be integrated in the psychiatric hospitals‟ protocol of care in conjunction with pharmacological therapy for going beyond the traditional treatment process of patients with schizophrenia.

Ahmed Sahib Mubarak

Papers

Investigating pragma-rhetorical strategies utilized by American commencement speakers to motivate graduates for managing future opportunities and challenges

Ethnicity and the Pragmatic Strategies in American Christian Sermons

The Humourous Effect of the Inappropriateness of Speech Acts in the Sitcom of Still Standing

Domestication of English Expressions Used by Iraqi Arabic Speakers: A Sociolinguistic Study

Effect of Social Skills Enhancement Training Program on Negative Symptoms among Patients with Schizophrenia