Bragging as a Speech Act: A Pragmatic Study in Iraqi Arabic Dialect

Abstract

     This study investigates bragging speech act in Iraqi Arabic dialect.  It aims to identify the types and strategies of bragging employed by Iraqi Arabs when performing this speech act. An open-ended Discourse Completion Task was employed to collect the data comprising six situations with varying social status of the bragger (lower, equal, and higher) and social distance (familiar and close). Fifty male students participated in this study, aged 22-23, and speaking Arabic as their native language. This study followed descriptive statistical approach to analyse the data.  The participants' responses were coded into semantic formulas according to Blum-Kulka and Olshtain's (1984) categorisation, then the coded semantics formulas classified into direct and indirect bragging followed by Dayter (2016). This study showed that bragging speech act among Iraqi Arabs was seen as a face-enhancing act that save the face of both the speaker and the hearer. The findings indicated that Iraqi Arabs preferred direct bragging rather than indirect ones across the six situations. The study also showed that Iraqi Arabs employed seven types of bragging and 35 types of strategies. The seven types included personal and professional, identity and affiliation, social, material, religious, social/linguistic intelligence, and mitigated bragging. However, Iraqi Arabs' preference for these seven types of bragging varied according to the three levels of social status and the two levels of social distance. Similarly, Iraqi Arabs also varied their tendencies for types of strategies of bragging across the six situations. They preferred referring blessings in a situation with close-social-distance and lower-status interlocutors, while in bragging by familiar, lower-status interlocutors, they favoured downplaying achievement. In addition, when the bragger was in equal status and close social distance, mentioning religious deeds was the most dominant. However, demonstrating intelligence and expertise was the prominent when bragging performed by familiar, equal-status bragger. Notably, Iraqi Arabs maintained their dominant use of demonstrating intelligence and expertise when the bragger was close, higher-status interlocutor. Finally, when the bragger was of higher status with familiar social distance, Iraqi Arabs employed performing conspicuous consumption as the most preferred strategy. It hoped that present study provides useful insights into how speech acts, like bragging, are performed in Iraqi Arab culture. Consequently, by learning these strategies, misunderstanding and misinterpretation can be reduced more effectively between Iraqi Arabs and learners of Arabic as a second or foreign language.