A linguistic and sociopragmatic and cultural study of swearing in Arabic

The present study addresses itself to the issue of swearing (S), in the sense of oath taking, as a very frequent speech act in daily conversations in Jordan. A corpus of oaths exchanged by interlocutors in real-life contexts is analysed. It is shown that S exhibits an extensive amount of variation in form, usage and function, and that it serves awide range of communicative functions. Oaths can be studied, on the one hand, as a cultural index of the community concerned, since they reflect the cultural patterns, values and themes that are dominant in this community, and, on the other hand, they may also be studied in a strictly linguistic setting, for example as moves to preface and modify speech acts.