A Pragma- Stylistic Analysis of Formal Congratulatory Letters in English and Arabic

Abstract

Politeness strategies are of significant importance to maintain the face of the addressee. Senders of formal congratulatory letters seek to create a positive image in the minds of their addresses by performing particular illocutionary acts and face-saving acts (FSAs) in the form of written texts. To the best knowledge of the researcher, this topic received little attention from linguistic researchers, especially on the pragma-stylistic level. The importance of this study arises from the fact that congratulatory formal letters are an effective tool in the successful performance of foreign relations and thus deserve investigation. The current study investigates the pragma-stylistic aspects of illocutionary acts and FSA Politeness Strategies in some selected English and Arabic formal congratulatory letters written by English and Arabic officials. Findings reveal that assertive constitutes the highest frequency in English data, while expressive occurs more in Arabic. Besides, the FSA politeness strategy (Use appropriate forms of address) includes most of the total frequency in both English and Arabic data, which still it appeared more in English. Additionally, (Exaggerate interest, sympathy with H) comes next in Arabic, while (Be optimistic) appeared more in English. In addition, results show that exaggeration (Hyperbole) is the prevalent stylistic device used in Arabic. Arabic officials usually exaggerate the glorification of people in authoritative positions, while English high officials tend to be more moderate. The findings will be helpful in cross-cultural comparative studies and other related fields.

A contrastive study of the English and Myanmar configurations of process, participants, and circumstances from the systemic functional perspective

“…Over the last two decades, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the examination of transitivity systems within and across languages, particularly within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The predominant focus of prior research has been grounded in Halliday's transitivity theory (Halliday, 1985), as evidenced by works such as TÚ (2011), Sun and Zhao (2012), Al-Janabi (2013), and Lavid and Arus (2002).…”