Abstract

This paper aims at investigating the generic and registerial features of Arabic and English apology messages written on Facebook by Jordanian and American university students. The data collected by means of distributing a simulated written paragraph to the participants via Facebook consist of one hundred Arabic and English messages (fifty Arabic and fifty English). The results demonstrate that Arabic and English apology messages written on Facebook share the same communicative purposes, but differ with respect to the number of moves and the lexical and stylistic choices employed by both the Jordanian and American students. The findings of this study have been attributed to the universality of expressing apology, diglossia of Arabic, and to a variation in the subjects’ linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds and perceptions.

Highlights

  • It is undeniable that the internet is currently a very significant and recent medium of communication used globally among people

  • The results demonstrate that Arabic and English apology messages written on Facebook share the same communicative purposes, but differ with respect to the number of moves and the lexical and stylistic choices employed by both the Jordanian and American students

  • The findings reveal that the examined e-mails shared the same communicative purpose, it appeared that the generic components and the registerial features used by the Jordanian students did not generally match those used by the American students in terms of the type, number, and frequency of genre moves and the registers employed to structure genre texts

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Summary

Introduction

It is undeniable that the internet is currently a very significant and recent medium of communication used globally among people. The internet is an association which consists of numerous computer networks through which messages can be sent from one computer to another There is a rapid development in computer-mediated communication over the past decade, which has led to a widespread expansion of the internet and to having online communities 94) defines the linguistic identity of e-mail as a variety of language and considers it as a communicative genre. 2) points out that Facebook is a new medium of communication considered as an extension of and similar to other online networks, such as e-mail, in that it allows people to communicate with each other. The slight difference between the two websites is that Facebook is less formal than e-mail and is used only among friends and acquaintances

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