A Linguistic Study of Praise with Reference to Arabic Religious Texts

Abstract

This study explores praise as one of the expressive acts in Arabic. The love of praise is part of human nature and a sincere praise is an important tool in giving people confidence and hence making them feel happy and satisfied. The problem may increase when the speaker expresses his praise by using words of blame which might create some sort of ambiguity to the reader because he might understand it as blame rather than praise. For the sake of presenting and discussing the act of praising in Arabic, the present study aims at proving the linguistic devices of praise focusing on three aspects: pragmatic, semantic and syntactic in some religious texts. The theoretical part deals with investigating the pragmatic, semantic and syntactic aspects of praise as well as its types. The practical part deals with analyzing some religious texts taken from different aayas from different suras in the Glorious Quran. It is concluded that praise can be applied to religious texts depending on three aspects of language and Arabic language is distinguished by its heavy use of explicit and implicit forms expressing praise.