The present study investigates the pragmatic functions of ʕafiah (literally meaning health, wellbeing, or wholeness) in Jordanian Spoken Arabic (JSA), using Levinson's pragmatic framework to examine its varied uses in context. For this purpose, the researchers compiled an initial list of situations in which ʕafiah is used. They based their selection on their knowledge as native speakers of JSA with the expression and their familiarity with the expression's usage. They then highlighted and explored the pragmatic function of ʕafiah in each context. Two Arabic language instructors validated the discovered functions and proposed changes to several of the situations and functions. The acceptability of the revised list was tested against the linguistic intuition of 40 native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. The findings revealed that ʕafiah serves twelve pragmatic functions, all related to expressing various emotions or attitudes: praise, happiness, approval, appreciation, mockery, disapproval, surprise, anger, frustration, annoyance, condemnation, and surrender. The study further showed that ʕafiah functions as a pragmatically versatile discourse marker, predominantly conveying negative rather than positive meanings. It concluded that context plays a pivotal role in understanding and interpreting the pragmatic meanings performed by ʕafiah in different socially grounded situations. Future studies should investigate the pragmatic meanings of ʕafiah across different Arabic dialects, such as Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni, and others.
Hassi et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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