This study explores the pragmatic strategies of the English speech acts of "suggestion" and "advice" as used by Iraqi EFL university students. The data analyzed in this study were collected in the Dept. of English, College of Education, University of Babylon. The subjects encompass 50 Iraqi EFL undergraduate learners who are native speakers of Arabic. The gender of the subjects is taken into consideration during the execution of the speech acts in question. The instrument of the study is a discourse completion task (DCT) consisting of two questions. In responding to the questions, the participants are asked to pay heed to the social variable of status to see whether it affects the execution of the speech acts under study.Keywords: speech acts, advice, suggestion, strategies, Iraqi EFL learners' performance PreliminariesBoth advice and suggestion are speech acts used in daily communication to influence other people. They are milder than commands since the decision about what to do is in the hands of the hearer, but in practice they are tactful ways of giving commands or instructions, thus, they are regarded as face-threatening acts that need to be softened or mitigated. In EFL classrooms, the major aim is not only to teach students how to utilize speech acts but also how to interpret and comprehend them with respect to the strategies used to indicate each act in order to develop a pragmatic competence that is computed on the basis of the ability to understand the intended meaning. This competence covers both sociolinguistic and illocutionary aspects and since the uses of the strategies which realize speech acts vary across cultures, the focus is on social appropriateness because the addresser could have in mind a variety of intended meanings which are considered a barrier to successful communication. These barriers may be educational and sociocultural. The problem would become more pressing because illocutionary competence is not always directly grasped from its surface structure that is why learning the pragmatic rules(appropriateness and politeness rules) of other languages enables the learners to produce forms of language that are socially and culturally appropriate since the native language of the learners and the other languages are not similar. As such, the study proposes the following hypotheses as a point of departure : (1)the speech acts of advice and suggestion are similar in certain respects and different in others, (2) different pragmatic strategies and syntactic formulae are employed by Iraqi EFL learners to accomplish the speech acts in question, (3)direct strategies are more frequent than others in the performance of the subjects, and (4) female subjects are more cognizant of status in responding to the situations they are given than their male counterparts, and (5) female learners use more politeness markers than their male counterparts..

Language is used for influencing people. Various means, whether honest or dishonest, are appealed to for achieving this purpose. This means that people fulfill their goals either through telling their interlocutors the truth or through deceiving and misleading them. In this regard, deception is a key aspect of many strategic interactions including bargaining, military operations, and politics. However, in spite of the importance of this topic, it has not been pragmatically given enough research attention particularly in politics. Thus, this study sets itself the task of dealing with this issue in this genre from a pragmatic perspective. Precisely, the current work attempts to answer the following question: What is the pragmatics of deception in American presidential electoral speeches? Pragmatics, here, involves the speech acts used to issue deceptive utterances, deceptive strategies resulting in the violation of Grice's maxims, as well as cognitive strategies.In other words, this study aims at finding out the answer to the question raised above. In accordance with this aim, it is hypothesized that American presidential candidates use certain deceptive/misleading strategies to achieve their goals. In this regard, they utilize certain strategies which violate Grice's maxims such as ostensible promise, equivocation, fabrication, and dissociation. Moreover, they make use of certain cognitive strategies like: metaphor, presupposition, and positive self-representation/ negative other representation.In order to achieve the aim of the study and verify or reject its hypothesis, a model is developed for the analysis of the data under examination. Besides, a statistical means represented by the percentage equation is used to calculate the results. The most important finding arrived at by this study is that American presidential candidates most often resort to the strategies of giving an ostensible promise, equivocation, presupposition, and positive self/negative other representation to fulfill their goals.

No abstract

Civility is a widespread phenomenon in societies as it has its own place as one of the social values of humanity. In this regard, civility is conceived of as the act of showing regards for others through civilized verbal behaviour. However, civility is much more than that since it is viewed as the baseline of respect people owe to each other in public life. Generally speaking, civility prevails in religious contexts; nevertheless, it can be investigated in other contexts. Accordingly, the present study purports to set itself this task through concerning itself with the investigation of civility in a context other than the religious one. Precisely, it is intended to scrutinize this linguistic phenomenon in a speech by Prince Harry of Britain (the Duke of Sussex) with the aim of revealing the strategies through which civility is pragmatically realized. The data is purposefully chosen since Prince Harry is described as being civil and courteous. To achieve the aim of the study, the relevant literature on civility is surveyed and a model is developed for the purpose of pragmatically analyzing the data under perusal and coming out with certain findings.

Advice-giving is a common activity that occurs between friends, family members, or between professionals and lay people in written or spoken form, in face-to-face situations or in mediated forms of communication. According to Miller (2010: 11), the act of advice-giving in a religious context is called preaching. In spite of the importance of this topic, it has not been given due research attention. Thus, this study sets itself the task of dealing with preaching in religious contexts. Precisely, the study attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How is preaching defined? (2) What are the linguistic realizations of the act of preaching in the analyzed data? (3) What are the felicity conditions of the act of preaching? And (4) Through which strategies is preaching realized in the data under preview? In other words, this study aims at shedding light on the act of preaching through investigating it at three linguistic levels: semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic in some selected speeches by Al-Imam Al-Hasan (peace be upon him). In accordance with these aims, it is hypothesized that (1) Preaching usually takes the form of an imperative, whether positive or negative, (2) Pragmatically, preaching is best issued via direct strategies to urge the targets to consider it seriously. In order to achieve the aims of the study and verify or reject its hypothesis, a model is developed for the analysis of the data under examination. Besides, a statistical means represented by the percentage equation is used to calculate the results.