Abstract
The focus of this paper is to investigate whether the divorce act is one of the performative speech acts in English and Arabic cultures or not. The researchers assumed that what is regarded performative speech act in one culture might not be so in another. This assumption is applied to the divorce act in both English and Arab cultures. The researchers believe that divorce as a speech act underlies some pragmalinguistic differences in English and Arabic. To manipulate this argument, certain religious and legislative texts extracted from Arabic and English cultures are to be discussed to prove this assumption. To achieve the aim of this paper, the researchers adopt Austin’s (1962) interpretation of speech act theory and the concept of Felicity Conditions (FCs). Consequently, the goal of this study is to discuss and compare cross-culturally the divorce act in both languages to identify the similarities and differences between the two languages.
Highlights
Most of the attempts to define language focus on searching what language is used for, or how it functions within a speech community
This is because marriage is to unite two persons in a legal bond; whereas divorce is to break this legal bond of marriage
It was concluded that divorce in Islamic law (Shariah) is the husband’s right to utter the legal formula صیغة شرعیةSighah that has an illocutionary force to perform the act of divorce
Summary
Most of the attempts to define language focus on searching what language is used for, or how it functions within a speech community. This is because in certain situations users of a language may not be able to distinguish between what is said and what is meant; there is no correlation between the form and the deed This fact inspired philosophers, linguists to develop a theory that concerned with understanding the relationship between what is said and what is meant; this is represented by the Speech Act Theory (SAT) (Cooper, 1973; Van Dijk, 1977). Austin (1962) affirmed that the violation of any of these felicity conditions makes the speech act infelicitous and cannot be validly performed Most of these conditions are mainly relevant to particular ceremonial and ritual performative acts such as having a husband and wife, naming a ship and baptizing a child. The paper will analyse some religious and legislative texts in English and Arabic to find out points of similarity and difference between the two languages by adopting Austin’s concepts of FCs as a model of analysis
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