موجز عن البحث:
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This study aims at examining the
symbolic role of Arabic, particularly Standard Arabic, other than its
instrumental and communicative role, on Arabs national identities. The
symbolic function of the language has been chosen as it plays an important
role in forming the beliefs and ideologies of the people towards their
identities generally, and their national (or collective) identity in
particular, which in turn influences the practices and policies of the
language. Moreover, it has always been considered a very significant issue in
the identification of national identity, whether in its role as a marker for
national identity or an aspect of other important ingredients. The study can
confirm how the Arabic language is ideologically important to Arabs and how it
has been used as an instrument for resisting the cultural, and sometimes
political, challenges to identities from others. It can be said that the
symbolic function of Arabic makes it one of the languages that are infused
with ideology.
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ملخص المشاركة:
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Language
and religion have both been considered by researchers (e.g. Tillich, 1968;
Geertz, 1993; Schiffman, 1996) as distinguishing and influential components
of culture that interact with and influence each other. In an attempt to
understand the relationship between religion and language, this study aims to
examine the influence of religion on language as a communicative means,
focusing on the effect of Islam and Islamic values and beliefs on the
everyday language of Saudi speakers of Arabic. To explore the extent of
religion’s influence on language use, the study focuses on the use of
religious expressions in the performance of speech acts. It attempts to
answer the following questions, which will in turn demonstrate the extent of
religion’s influence on language use.
This
empirical study investigates certain religious expressions and words in the
daily speech of Saudi speakers of Arabic through analysing specific speech
acts (i.e. greeting, requesting, thanking, congratulating, promising,
complimenting and apologising). Speech acts, as a way of analysing
communicative language to explore religion’s influence on language use, have
been chosen because they represent a type of linguistic discourse that occurs
in everyday interactions and are recognised as having many cultural and
social norms (Meier, 2010). This study mainly uses qualitative analysis based
on speech act theory (SAT) (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Searle et al., 1980)
and politeness theory (PT) (Brown and Levinson, 1987). In addition to these
theories, the researcher uses theological and ideological considerations as
an additional framework. Quantitative approaches are also used to measure the
actual presence and frequency of religious expressions and words in order to
generate statistical representations of the linguistic phenomenon and to
consider different variables. The research employs three approaches to collect
the data: role plays to elicit linguistic discourse for analysis;
ethnographic interviews to probe the motivations behind their language use;
and the experimental measurement of participants’ linguistic awareness to
examine their recognition of the presence and function of certain religious
expressions. It has been found that religious expressions play a significant
role in the performance of certain speech acts and have great influence in
performing the three levels of certain speech acts: locutionary acts,
illocutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. In addition, religious
expressions have been found to contribute to the degree of the positive and
negative politeness of specific speech acts. Moreover, the participants’
responses reveal awareness of the religious and ideological motivations
behind the use of religious expressions.
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