A Pragmatic Study of Gossip Column in Some English and Arabic Newspapers A Contrastive Study

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to study gossip in two English and Arabic Newspapers. It pragmatically tackles gossip in these mass media. Consequently, it attempts to achieve the following aims: (1) identifying how the speech act is performed in relation to media gossip. (2) Examining to what extent presupposition is revealing the intended meaning of media gossips. To fulfill the aims of this study, it is hypothesized that: (1) Pragmatic principles occur randomly in English and Arabic media gossip.(2) Speech act, presupposition are the major pragmatic components of gossip. (3) existential presupposition and the speech act of assertions are the most common pragmatic components in media gossip. To achieve the aims of this work and test its hypotheses, the following procedures are followed: (1) the relevant literature about gossip is reviewed. (2) The gossip columns (the data of the current work) in the two newspapers under investigation are analyzed by means of the model developed by this study. (3) Carrying out a contrastive analysis of the ways of expressing gossip in both languages.