Department of Archives and documents will host a presentation by Iqbal Sahib, PhD, on directive speech acts in Arabic. She explained the prominent role classical Arab scholars have in all dimensions of speech act theory. They focus on providing linguistic analysis of the theory, although Arabic theory was scattered among the books of traditional thinkers, books of semantics, books by rhetoricians and books of linguistics. Arabs preceded modern linguists to investigate the bases for speech act theory. This is expected because the traditional thinkers were originally linguists and logicians. Interest with speech act theory led them to extract the judgements from the Holy Koran and the traditional proverbs which led them to adopt judicial and religious decisions. Their interest with an intention,the psychological meaning and research of different kinds of meaning led them to study proposition, convention and conversation implicature. Arab linguists and traditional thinkers realize the fact that language is not only the means for describing or stating but it is also the means for acting too as Austin names his book “How do things with words”. The presentation will be moderated by Sadiq Almaged
