The present paper zooms in on levels of pragmatic awareness and the range of stereotypical presuppositions as appearing in one specific text, i.e. the Soldier's Handbook to Iraq. This text was made available to the 1st infantry division of the US Army when they proceeded to Iraq in 2003. In the present mixed-methods study we demonstrate that the handbook systematically uses what Beukeboom and Burgers (2019) call 'biased language' in that the text is cohesively composed of such lexico-semantic choices that point explicitly or implicitly to (mostly negative) stereotypes associated with the categories of 'Arabs' or 'Iraqis'. We pay specific attention to the cross-cultural use of imperatives and lexical verbsone of them being ogaf ا و ﮔ ﻒ -"stop!" -as representing explicit speech acts of command. Overall, our study argues that the handbook came condemnably short in equipping its readers in terms of intercultural pragmatic competence and awareness, which surfaces both on the lexico-semantic level in the shape of stereotypical labels and descriptions of 'the Iraqi' as well as on the pragmatic level in terms of politeness and face-threatening language use towards Iraqis in Iraq.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.