Evil-eye expressive strategies between utterers and interpreters: A pragmatic study on Colloquial Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

Following Alqarni (2020), this research article provides a pragmatic undertaking of evil eye as a constructed speech act, with a particular focus on data from Colloquial Jordanian Arabic (CJA), whose culture has not been significantly examined in this regard. Firstly, the research article demonstrates that Jordanian eyers use a set of linguistic strategies for evil eye performance including similes, metaphors, questions, negation, and exclamation. Secondly, it shows that Jordanian eyers use a group of designated discourse markers (DMs) that normally express evil eye or endorse it. We argue that the presence of such markers gives rise to an impolite speech act. Therefore, contra Alqarni (2020), this article proposes that some evil eye boosters (i.e., discourse markers) can be accommodated within impoliteness models (Culpeper 1996, 2011). According to a survey of 100 CJA native speakers, evil-eye DMs present impoliteness intentionally and in an unambiguous way. The use of evil-eye DMs is viewed as both a bald-on-record strategy of impoliteness and negative impoliteness because an eyee is frightened that his/her possessions and/or skills would become at risk.