SPeech Act of Threatening in Kurdsih With Reference to English

Parween Saadi Abdul Aziz

Dept. of Sports Sciences, College of Physical Education and Sports Sciences, Duhok University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25130/jls.6.2.2

Keywords: Commissive Speech Acts, Directive Speech Acts, Pragmatics, Performativity, Implicitness vs, Explicitness, Situational Context


Abstract

Speech act of threatening has been a very crucial utterance in the process of communication whether casual or institutional. It can fall within two taxonomies of speech acts: commissive and directive; the former being speaker oriented, while the latter being hearer oriented. The current study aims at investigating this act in Kurdish language with reference to English. Diverse contexts have been provided , using Discourse Completion Task as a means for data collection and an eclectic model has been adopted for data analysis. As the main concluding remarks, threatening speech act is not used performatively especially in Kurdish, but the structure of the sentence and vocabulary involved are very salient expressions of the force of the threat. Additionally, the forms and the functions proposed by the scholars found in the English language have the same impact on the Kurdish language. The main elements that affect the directness of the act in question are, solely but not exclusively, the interlocutors as they are determined by social and/or institutional factors.