CATEGORIZING DECLARATIVE SPEECH ACTS IN ENGLISH – ARABIC POLITICALTRANSLATION : A PRAGMATIC STUDY

Abstract

Declaratives are those speech acts that brings changes to the world via uttering them. They are judged by certain pragmatic criteria and determined by certain conditions to be taken as genuine acts. Thus, their specification raises problematic area as not all declarative utterances serve out performatively. The specificity of pragmatic conditions of declaratives lead to another problem in that affecting the same immediate change would not similarly be attributed in two different languages. Therefore, declaratives pose difficulties for translators in categorizing them and affecting immediate change. Accordingly, it aims at: 1)setting some felicity conditions for determining whether the specified declarative expressions serve out performatively. 2)Examining whether English declaratives are perceived performatively in Arabic and vice versa. 3- providing some remedies for mistranslated declaratives. The objective of study is confined to a number of declaratives selected from dialogues, comments, and debates of English and Arabic Channels ( e.g. Al-Jazeera TV and BBC). The result of the study shows that declaratives are performatively influenced by contextual nature. From functional perspective, the perception of English declarative acts are different from the Arabic ones and vice versa. The most accurate rendering of declaratives is based on the correspondence between perception and immediate illocutionary affects.