A Pragmatic Study of Oath Acts in English With Refernce to Arabic Oath - A Contrastive Study

Abstract

Oath is a speech act with typically intensive expressive mode. It is intentionally issued to emphasize and scrutinize certain statements. Constitutionally, oaths are subsumed under two unrelated pragmatic genres jointly: constative and performative.In fact, the major problem lies in the fact in determining a judgment accurately on whether the oath expression is a performative or consatitive. As a performative act, oath is ultimately typified under the umbrella of commissive speech acts. The performative act virtually indicates an execution of other illocutionary acts simultaneously such as assertive, expressive, and declarative.This reciprocally offers overlapping that permanently entails maintainable consistent pragmatic parameters and highly regarded interpretive supplements. Besides, oaths may be overtly realized via other acts such as apologizing, promising, or even threatening leading to covertly implicated oaths.Additionally, the pragmatic propositional and socio- cultural constraints of English - Arabic oath may be realized differently due to cultural divergences. Thence, this study aimed at proposing valid pragmatic parameters for genuinely indicating the nature and type of act performed via uttering oath expression, as well as clarifying how the expressions of oath are realized in both languages. In conclusion, performative oaths are intently marked via the obtained illocutionary act that they felicitously hold. In addition, there is no formal correlation between the proposition of oaths and their performative achievement. Finally, there is no one- to one correspondence between English oath speech acts and their Arabic counterparts.