Violence against women stands as one of the most dominant human rights violations. There are no social, economic, or national boundaries when it comes to violence against women. It is estimated that one in three women in the world will experience physical or sexual abuse at some point in their lives. Several non-governmental organizations’ reports have addressed the problem of violence against women in Iraq. Thus; the current study provides a critical analysis of the discursive techniques that are employed in the non-governmental organizations’ reports to show how Iraqi women are abused and subject to violence. Consequently; this study focuses on the linguistic and ideological underpinnings of a selected text on violence against women in Iraq. It attempts to show how language produces and maintains domination and abuse of power, engendering injustice, inequality, and ideological viewpoints. To answer this, the researchers draw upon van Dijk’s (2011) socio-cognitive approach and (2000) ideological analysis. The findings of the study have revealed that the non-governmental organizations’ report attempts to reflect the ideological position of the non-governmental organizations towards the Iraqi government, which declared its rejection of violence against women through its constitution and Panel Code. Despite this, the researchers have found that there is no actual adoption of these provisions in reality in its social context. Accordingly; the report has depended heavily on authority and evidentiality to show power relations and through the construction of reality based on societal perspectives. Using the linguistic and discoursal strategies employed in the analysis; the researchers have found that the report has materialized a negative attitude towards the government and society by referring to the power dominance which is exercised by social groups

The study of kinship has attracted the attention of many scholars in various linguistic, anthropological, and religious contexts. Because kinship terms are one of the linguistic systems of any language, the researchers adopted Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics theory as an analytical tool. This is because this SFL can explicate different fields of study such as linguistics and discourse analysis. Such fields are regarded as fields of language socialization that cannot be studied inseparable from their social or cultural contexts.To achieve a textual analysis of kinship terms, the researchers used selected sampled texts taken from the Glorious Quran and the Holy Bible. The main findings pointed out that Halliday’s model can be applied to different social fields such as religious, political, and economic texts. Such an analysis of these texts may lead to give some solutions to the social and economic problems in which human beings may face in everyday life.

Recently, women's rape has been a pervasive problem in the Iraqi society. Thus, it has become necessary to consider the role of language and its influence on the common beliefs and opinions about rape in the Iraqi society. Thus, taking into consideration the critical role of language and its impact on the perception of human reality and the social development based on people's beliefs and principles of life has become highly indispensable. Therefore. The aim of this article is to address this problem critically from legislation and social norms in NGOs' reports (2015; 2019) with reference to some provisions from the Iraqi Panel Code (1969; 2010). Therefore, the researchers examine the discursive strategies and ideological viewpoints in the selected data through the employment of critical discourse analysis. Specifically, the researchers have adopted van Dijk's (2011) socio-cognitive approach and van Dijk's (2000) ideological model to show how language produces and reproduces domination and abuse of power, engendering as a  result injustice and inequality. The study has concluded that the NGOs' reports are written in a language that reflects the attitudes and opinions which might be shared among group members. These reports rely heavily on the linguistic device that is of evidentiality to assure the credibility of giving evidence about the domination of social norms in relation to women's rape. More importantly, the dichotomy of positive and negative representation is highly adopted as an ideological strategy, showing the conflict between the legislation and social norms. Therefore, the study has recommended that the government in its legal institutions should provide provisions to protect the raped women from society and from their families.

No abstract

Peer review (RP) process as an academic genre is a pivotal step to certify the research quality to be published by enhancing peer perspectives and imparting credibility. The aim of this paper is to scrutinise the formal, cognitive structuring, the significant evaluative features and pragmatic value. To address this aim, a framework based on Bhatia’s (1993) cognitive structuring model and Fortanet's (2008) model of moves is adopted to analyse two referees' reports from two various disciplines namely Social Sciences and Veterinary Medicine solicited from Iraqi academicians. The findings unravel that there is a special format that followed by referees in their reports concerning the balanced use of positive/ negative comments along with the structural organization adopted. The generic structuring of the two analysed reports includes four paramount moves that are similar despite they are from two different disciplines. In addition, the most notably comments assigned by referees' reports are content related defects which are amalgamated with the use of language written.