Discourse Phases, Schemas, Speech Acts & Implicature of Bribery in English and Arabic

Verbal offences are language crimes that are committed by uttering utterances of certain words or expressions. One of those offences is bribery. Bribery has extensively been studied and compared in different legal systems and legislations, yet, the linguistic aspects of this crime has not been given due interest. The present study attempts to bridge this gap by studying this offence from a pragmatic perspective in terms of discourse phases, schemas, speech acts and implicature in English and Arabic. This study tries to achieve the following aims: Shedding light on the similarities and differences in bribery between English and Arabic in terms of discourse phases, schemas, speech acts and implicature and showing in which community bribery is more common than the other: English or Iraqi-Arabic. The data of this study consisting of 10 complaints in English and Arabic were collected from Courts of Appeal in Iraq, Britain and the United States. They are analyzed in terms of an eclectic model constructed from Shuy (2013), Searle (1975) and Grice (1967). The results indicate that the bribery cases have the same phases and schemas in both languages. The locutionary acts, in both English and Arabic bribery, are expressed by verbs. But in terms of illocutionary acts, bribery is different between English and Arabic. As far as implicature is concerned, bribery is expressed by different linguistic structures in English and Arabic.