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Conversational Implicature in English and Cairene Arabic: A Study in Contrastive Linguistics

Article

Last updated: 05 Jan 2025

Subjects

-

Tags

Linguistics

Abstract

This study aims at exploring and analyzing conversational implicatures in Cairene Arabic. It, also, aims at testing whether variables as age and sex have influence on the use of conversational implicature in Arabic or not, and whether English proficiency affects the use of conversational implicature in English as a nonnative language or not. In addition, the present study aims at contrasting conversational implicatures between spoken Arabic as a native language and spoken English as a foreign language. To fulfill the purpose of the study, data was collected from Cairene Arabic, transcribed and analyzed by the researcher according to Grice's (1975) "Cooperative Principle". Two questionnaires were administered to a group of Cairenes to test the use of Conversational Implicature. One of them is in Arabic and the other is in English. It was obvious that conversational implicatures can function differently in different contexts. The results of the present study indicate that implicatures exist in Arabic. Moreover, Arabic involves implicatures more than English does. Also, the results reveal that there are some situations in which the participants use implicatures least, and there are some other situations where implicatures are mostly used. Regarding age, the results of the first group reveal that implicatures are used by younger participants more than by old participants. Younger participants tend to be less relevant, less truthful, and more informative than what is required. However, older participants are relatively less informative, and more truthful in their Arabic responses. Regarding sex, the study reveals that males generally use implicatures in Arabic more than females do at all ages. Regarding English proficiency, the results exhibit that the more the participants are proficient in English, the more they use implicatures in their English responses. The study proves that there are some similarities in the use of implicatures in English and Arabic. Still there are some differences in the usage of implicature. Implicatures that are raised out of flouting the maxims of relevance and quality are detected to appear in Arabic more than in English. Also, Arabic responses tend to be more informative than what is required. 

DOI

10.21608/ejlt.2015.200704.1012

Keywords

Conversational implicature, CP, cooperative principle, Arabic discourse

Authors

First Name

Ahmed

Last Name

Abu-hassoub

MiddleName

M.

Affiliation

Department of English. Faculty of Languages. Sohag University. Sohag. Egypt

Email

abuhassoub@lang.sohag.edu.eg

City

Sohag

Orcid

0000-0001-9760-2486

Volume

2

Article Issue

1

Related Issue

32109

Issue Date

2015-07-01

Receive Date

2015-06-05

Publish Date

2015-07-01

Page Start

147

Page End

328

Online ISSN

2314-6699

Link

https://ejlt.journals.ekb.eg/article_340073.html

Detail API

https://ejlt.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=340073

Order

340,073

Type

Research in linguistic and literary studies

Type Code

2,266

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Egyptian Journal of Linguistics and Translation

Publication Link

https://ejlt.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Conversational Implicature in English and Cairene Arabic: A Study in Contrastive Linguistics

Details

Type

Article

Created At

28 Dec 2024