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This paper investigates whether there are Felicity Conditions (FCs) for the same-sex marriage as being a contemporary practice of marriage relations in some countries. As such, the researchers adopt Austin's (1962) Felicity Conditions (FCs) to examine if conditions of satisfaction are applicable to the same-sex marriage in Christian and Islamic cultures. The researchers focus on analysing and discussing the social, religious, and linguistic conventional procedures of the speech acts of marriage, specifically in the same-sex marriage discourse. We find out that same-sex marriage in Christianity is totally different from the traditional marriage with regard to the social, religious, and linguistic conventions. Consequently, we concluded that same-sex marriage discourse has no FCs in contrast to the traditional marriage in Christianity as well as marriage in Islam which has not changed in form and opposite sex marriage.

This paper analyses a news story published on the BBC news website, reporting the first elections for a full-term government to replace the interim one which took over after Saddam's fall in 2003. The focus of this study is on the macro-and microsemantics of the news story and ideological representations. To carry out this study, the researcher employs van Dijk's (1980) theory of Semantic Macrostructure to examine the news discourse at the macro-level and micro-level, and van Dijk's (1998) theory of ideology to investigate group ideology at both levels. Utilising Wodak's (2001) discourse-historical approach, the linguistic and ideological analyses are supported by background information where a historical and political critique is provided to ensure objectivity in the process of interpretation. The findings of the macro-and micro-semantics are identical and they reflect the dichotomy between the in-group and out-group stance towards New Iraq whereby positive selfrepresentation and negative other-representation are explicitly and implicitly manifested respectively in the text of the news story.

This study adapts a Medical English Language Anxiety Scale (MELAS) based on Horwitz’s Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) and examines students’ anxiety in medical English vocabulary, listening and speaking, communication, literature reading, and academic paper writing. The biographical factors related to medical English language anxiety (MELA) were also tested. The questionnaire sets including five dimensions were distributed to the students from a medical university in Sichuan, China, and were statistically analyzed by using SPSS 22.0 and AMOS 21.0. By employing the adapted MELAS, it was found that 85.2% of the medical students surveyed suffered moderate and higher anxiety. Among all dimensions, students with listening and speaking anxiety recorded the highest (89.3%), followed by literature reading anxiety (86.6%), English academic writing anxiety (85.9%), communication anxiety (81.9%), and vocabulary learning anxiety (81.2%). We also found that the anxiety of rural medical students in each dimension was higher than that of urban medical students. This study suggests that English teachers should be fully aware of their students’ language anxiety situation, design interesting class activities, and create a relaxed English learning atmosphere in classroom teaching to make students less nervous when learning medical English in class.

This study explores the affinal (marriage kinship) relations and terminologies in Arab culture ethnosemantically. The affinal kinship terminologies represent the second basic taxonomy of kinship relations in every culture. The study includes a qualitative analysis by adopting the ethnosemantic or Cultural Domain Analysis (CDA) approach to fulfil the aims of this study. This approach helps researchers to identify and discuss the main terminologies of affinal kinship domain used in Arab culture. The study is based on data collected from the Holy Quran and some Arabic philology books. The study of this social domain in Arab culture is very useful to perceive and transfer people’s culture to other communities. Moreover, recognizing and understanding certain culture’s domains and norms may help people from other cultures avoid miscommunication or misunderstanding of other’s cultures and help use the suitable items based on certain contexts. The findings of this study emphasised the importance of studying this domain as a socio-cultural phenomenon that may help distinguish the main terminologies of marriage relations in Arab culture.