Promise and threat are two speech acts that are found in most languages. They are regarded as two important acts in maintaining social relationships between the individuals in any society. These acts can be performed and interfered in different aspects of life such as social, pedagogical, political, and religious relationships. The use of these two acts, whether explicitly or implicitly, differs from culture to culture and from society to another. Sometimes ambiguity may arise when applying these two speech acts to literary texts and particularly to religious ones with regard to the fact that these texts are regarded as communicative acts between the Addresser ‘Allah (?)’ and the common people. Thus analyzing the text according to the pragmatic meaning behind such texts can solve such ambiguity. For the sake of presenting and discussing these two acts in English and Arabic explicitly, the present study tries to achieve the following goals: (1) investigating the linguistic forms (semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic) that can be used in expressing these two acts in both English and Arabic; (2) showing to what extent we can apply the felicity conditions of these two acts to religious texts, and (3) exploring the close relationship between these two acts as well as other branches of study. The study has been conducted on the bases of the following hypotheses: (1) the acts of promising and threatening can be applied to certain religious texts on the basis of being communicative acts; (2) the act of promise may face some points of differences between English and Arabic in some linguistic aspects; (3) the act of threat can be realized similarly in some structural aspects in both languages;(4) both acts cannot be separated from each other since they are in complementary distribution. To investigate the validity of these hypotheses, theoretical and practical analyses have been adopted. The theoretical part deals with investigating the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic aspects of these acts as well as their felicity conditions. The practical part deals with analyzing and assessing selected religious texts from the Glorious Quran and the Holy Bible. This analysis is based on the two modified models of felicity conditions for the two acts of promising and threatening. Most importantly, the researchers’ point behind choosing these religious texts is that such texts are regarded as acts of communication between the Sender (?) and the public. In these texts, Allah (?) communicates with us through His messengers. We believe that these religious texts are fully communicative acts since they carry messages of speech acts, illocutionary acts, which are generally descended to address all people without any exception. The perlocutionary force of such texts is to elevate and soothe the soul of people, and the contextual factors of these texts may be extended to the future events. The framework of this study is organized in three sections. The first two sections deal with the speech acts of promising and threatening in both English and Arabic, discussing their semantic, syntactic and pragmatic views. These two acts are followed by the practical analysis of some Quranic (Arabic) and Biblical (English) texts according to the models of felicity conditions discussed at the end of each section. The third section focuses on studying the close relationship between promise and threat. The conclusions finalize this study. It is worth mentioning that these two speech acts are so closely related to each other that it seems somehow illogical to deal with one act leaving the other. This may justify the length of this study. However, the following list of abbreviations will be followed for economy.

Author Name: Prof. RIYADH TARIQ KADHIM AL-AMEEDI

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Keywords: PROMISE AND THREAT IN ENGLISH AND ARABIC RELIGIOUS TEXTS: A PRAGMATIC STUDY

ISSN: 2227-0345

EISSN: 2311-9152

EOI/DOI:

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