This article attempts to examine the theory of politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson in 1978. It presents its strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of many experienced linguists. Furthermore, the author contributes with her own observations and research results in relation to the theory and its applicability in Middle Eastern, particularly Arabic speaking communities. This article tackles the theory from a Middle Eastern perspective, when so far it has been mainly discussed in Western or Far Eastern cultures. The findings suggest that certain factors need to be added to the formula which Brown and Levinson (1978) have put forward as a means to calculate the weightiness of face-threatening acts. Such factors relate to the specific religious, environmental, and gestural aspects of different speech communities. Nevertheless, the theory proved to be applicable to a wide range of Western as well as Eastern cultures.
In this paper, the use of some deictic expressions-in the late King Fahad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud's speech to the international troops during the Second Gulf War-and its various implications on the message being delivered by the speaker, and its possible effect on the hearer are examined. Since the term deictic expression covers many linguistic items that could not possibly be comprehensively investigated in one paper, the focus of this paper is on personal pronouns which are analyzed in terms of frequency and implication in order to arrive at a better understanding of their implementation in such a historically significant political speech. The findings support the notions of critical discourse analysis regarding the relation of politics, power, ideologies, and discourse. The use of personal pronouns in this text was sometimes found to convey underlying messages which were intended to persuade the targeted audience of the speaker's decisions and at the same time justify certain major measures that were taken.
This paper investigates a problematic issue in many texts, particularly literary, that is of rendering hidden pragmatic meanings of idiomatic expressions into the TL. In order to arrive at the best strategy to do so from the perspective of the TL audience, in this case native speakers of English, the researcher provided the targeted audience with multiple translations of a single idiomatic expression, in context, and asked them to choose the best suiting translation from their point of view. Baker's strategies for translating idioms was the framework adopted for this study (Baker, 2018). The findings emphasized the importance of conveying the pragmatic meaning of idiomatic expressions with reservation of the aesthetic elements of the text. They also suggested that pragmatic and cultural highlights, in addition to translation strategies curricula, should be part of translation training programs.
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