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This paper deals with the pragmatic functions of ostensible invitations as used by Iraqi Arabic speakers. Iraqi society is known of the traditions in which pragmatic language is highly considered that Iraqi Arabic speakers use speech acts in order to pay compliments among each other. The issuance of various ostensible speech acts is to convey other purposes than those conveyed by the genuine ones. It is believed that it is vital to dig deep in the functions of the speech act of invitation as this speech act is mostly used by the Iraqi Arabic speakers in an ostensible manner. So, depending on a test formulated and administered to Iraqi Arabic speakers represented by college students, data have been collected and analyzed to show the strategies and functions used peculiarly by Iraqi Arabic speakers in addition to those stipulated by Clark and Isaac whose model is adapted in the analysis. In terms of the strategies used in addition to the seven ones mentioned in the model, new ones emerged and are believed to be peculiar to the Iraqi  Arabic speakers, for they are strongly related to the social norms of the Iraqi society. On the level of pragmatic functions, Iraqi Arabic speakers tend to use ostensible speech act of invitation for various purposes; chief among them are compliment, polite strategy, mitigation devices and others.

This study is concerned with phonopragmatics, as a phenomenon that is based on phonological factors to convey the speaker’s intentions in Husseini discourse. Husseini discourse is a genre which is mainly characterized by the use of eloquent religious styles. Specifically, the study aims to investigate the Husseini preachers’ use of prosodic patterns under the approach of phonopragmatics; that is, the pragmatic treatment of modifying the preachers’ intonation contours in their speeches. A workable model is designed for the analysis of the data, based on the exploitation of prosodic features. Twenty Husseini sermons are analyzed by means of the model. The most important findings of the analysis indicate that certain prosodic contours are pragmatically used by Husseini preachers in order to convey significant illocutionary forces and to highly affect their audience.

This paper is concerned with the pragmatic functions of slangy utterances used by Husseini preachers in the Iraqi context. Husseini preachers are religious and social reformers who use the Husseini issue as a foundation to their reformation. Slang is employed by such Husseini preachers in theirs lectures and sermons which are characterized by a highly formal context. Theoretical literature about pragmatics of slang is given. Afterwards, the pragmatic ends are investigated in a considerable number of lectures for various preachers. The most frequented slangy utterances used by Husseini preachers are selected and put in a questionnaire in accordance with a model adopted and selected for the objectives of the paper. In analyzing the data taken from the lecturers, sermons and the questionnaire, significant pragmatic functions are found that are related to the Iraqi society and the pragmatic strategies under the pragmatic principles, in addition to a pragmatic model which is peculiar to the Husseini context.

This paper deals with irony in electoral political speeches from pragmatic point of view represented by two American candidates: Barack Obama and George W. Bush. It has set itself to deal with this issue in particular because it has not been given due attention It falls in five sections; section one is an introduction, section two provides a literature review on irony, section three is to develop a model for ironic analysis, section four is about the analysis of the data, and section five sums up the conclusions. The paper attempts to investigate ironic strategies, stages, the possibility of understanding irony from the speaker's illocutionary force, and explicating the gradualness of the ironic insincerity where insufficient contextual clues exist. To achieve such aims, a model is developed for the analysis of irony in political electoral speeches. The findings of the analysis verify the hypotheses represented by the process of ironic stages, strategies, ironic insincerity of the speaker, and irony is an ostensible speech act. On the contrary, it rejects the hypothesis of not conveying irony where insufficient contextual clues exist.

This paper explores the phenomenon of grammatical zero, the absence of markers indicating grammaticalness in some constructions but they are still grammatical. It aims at giving an analytic account of EFL Iraqi learners' ability to recognize and produce grammatical zero through conducting a test to college students of English departments to address the main argument of the paper which is whether they face difficulty when performing the phenomenon in question. The findings obtained from the results of the test prove the hypothesis of the paper saying that Iraqi EFL learners' ability to use grammatical zero is poor. Consequently, the paper concludes that the reasons for such poor performance are attributed to language transfer represented by the interligual and intralingual negative transfer, context of learning and communicative strategies.

Parallelism is one of the linguistic tools used in literary works to make the text better in terms of reading and influencing the reader. Therefore, this study studies this linguistic tool in the religious texts and specifically in the Koran. This book (Quran) has affected all the people of all significantly since its descent and therefore this study is trying to find the answer to: Is this tool language is used here and to what extent. The hypothesis of this study is that parallelism is used in the Koran. Some of the short walls were selected from the Holy Quran for analysis. And then to present the conclusions that were the most important: This language tool has been used extensively in the Koran as well as some types of parallelism is used more than other species, as well as the use of parallelism in different ways as use to link more than two sentences.