The present study is an attempt to describe how Arab learners of English produce culture-specific expressions that create potential miscommunication across cultures. Three related approaches -ethnography of communication, pragmatic failure and conversational Analysis -were reviewed so as to get insights into understanding such a phenomenon. The subjects of the study consist of 120 male Saudi and Yemeni learners of English. In order to elicit data for the study, the subjects were given a Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) which consists of six situations wherein they picture themselves to be in the real situation and choose a response from the ones provided. The findings of the study showed that the hypothesized responses, which are Arab culture -specific communicative patterns, received high number of frequency compared to the other responses. Such communicative patterns are likely to cause miscommunication in situations like the ones described in the study. The study concluded that Arab speakers of English should be made aware of the misuse of such communicative patterns in order to minimize miscommunication in their communicative interaction across cultures.

The aim of this paper is to explore the violation of Grice's Maxims in the Arabic comedy Madraset Al-Mushaghbeen and explain how the violation of the maxims brings about humorous effects in the play. The analysis shows that 61 instances of maxims violation were identified in the play. Maxim of Manner receives the highest percentage of violation i.e., 24 (39.3%) compared to the other maxims. Maxims of Relevance and Quality come next, i.e., 14 (22.9%) and 13 (21.4%). Maxim of Quantity constitutes 10 number of violations (i.e., 21.4%). The study shows that most of maxim violations that create humorous situations are perceived through the following: rhetorical strategy of overstatement and personification, use of misleading conventional-coded expressions, incongruity of conversation-established concepts/ideas, and breaking of communication norms. The study also reveals that cultural and background knowledge significantly contribute to eliciting the humorous implicatures from the characters' utterances. The study concluded with the following implications: humorous implicature depends on the conventions of the speakers' community and the language shared among them; and it arises as a result of speakers' acts and/or expressions that tend to be incongruous with the behavior and concepts established in the culture of the concerned interlocutors.

The present study examined the frequently used metadiscourse devices in English scientific research articles written by native (English researchers) and non-native (Arab English researcher) and sought to determine whether differences exist in the use of these devices between Arab researchers of scientific research articles and Native English researchers of scientific research articles. Data was collected from forty research scientific articles written and published in international journals and Arab journals; analysis was done in accordance with Hayland’s model. The analysis revealed that frequently used metadiscourse devices in scientific articles written by native English writers and Arab English writers include evidentials code glosses, frame markers, and endophoric markers; and hedges; boosters; and attitude markers. The results also showed that native English writers of scientific articles embrace more metadiscourse resources than Arab English researchers of scientific academic articles. This confirms that native English writers of scientific articles are more proficient at English than Arab English researchers given the differences in the frequency of metadiscourse resources used. This finding has implication to Arab researchers of scientific research articles.

This study aims at describing the system of SPA (Saudi pidginized Arabic) as produced by AFEs (Asian foreign expatriates) working in Saudi Arabia with specific reference to universal characteristics of reduction and simplification in the system of morpho-syntactic structure of Saudi Arabic. The study is based on data collected through a semistructured interview technique probing into the features of SPA system. Thirty informants were randomly selected from among expatriates working in Saudi Arabia and belonging to different linguistic backgrounds-Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Tagalog, Indonesian, and Malayalam-as representatives of AFEs. The study showed that the AFEs tend to use simplified and reduced system of SA in order to communicate with its native speakers. This was reflected in producing variations of sentence word order that are not compatible with the sentence word order of SA, reduced inflectional verb forms and simplified noun phrase lacking agreement within its structure. The study concluded with the following implications: 1) SPA could be considered as an emerging contact variety among Asian expatriates in Saudi Arabic; 2) it has universal characteristics of reduction and simplification as shown in its structural system; 3) substrate languages play an essential role in the formation of the SPA.

Stance-marking of interaction is considered an important element for achieving effective communication in any academic discourse. Based on a descriptive-analytic approach, the present study addresses a two-fold objective: a) analyzing and comparing stance-marking of interaction across disciplines in the research articles written by Arab non-native speakers of English, and b) describing how researchers’ lack of using interactional linguistic markers in their research articles would constrain readers from interacting with the arguments and opinions they expressed in their academic articles. The corpus data comprised forty research articles selected randomly from two disciplines: sciences (ten engineering and ten medicine) and humanities (ten education and ten applied linguistics). The findings of the study showed an evident lack of stance-marking in research articles written in English by Arab researchers. A total of 307 occurrences of lack of stance markers were detected in the study corpus. Arab non-native researchers’ deficiency in employing stance markers in their research articles is likely to be attributed to their lack of knowledge and awareness about the effectiveness of stance-marking of interaction in academic writing. The results also show that science discipline articles have a higher frequency of lack of stance markers than humanities discipline articles. The difference between the two disciplines could be attributed to the distinctive persuasive nature of each discipline. The study concluded with some recommendations, including the inclusion of stance-marking of interaction in evaluating papers for publication and teaching academic writing to Arab non-native English postgraduate students.