Mahmoud Abed Al-Khatib

• Ph.D
• Professor (Full) at Jordan University of Science and Technology

This study attempts to extend politeness theory beyond informal situations to a more serious type of discourse, using data collected from the Holy Quran and the Prophet's sayings. Specifically, different aspects of social justice have been investigated in this study from an Islamic point of view. The data comprises 191 Quranic verses and 100 saying...

This paper contributes to the existing literature on an important aspect of politeness by investigating the linguistic performance of the speech act of favor-asking as used by Jordanian university students. Specifically, it aims to explore the effect of gender and social distance on favor-asking performance. Data were collected from 100 Jordanian u...

This research sought to investigate how to cope with COVID-19 from a socio-religious and pragmatic perspective. It has been argued that faith-based treatment programs play a major role in disease care and treatment. Unlike all previous studies of sociolinguistics, this is a religious discourse analysis of some Quranic verses and Prophetic sayings t...

This paper examines the socio-cultural practices surrounding the use of obituary announcements in two different cultures. Specifically, it investigates the structural and linguistic features as well as the euphemistic expressions related to death in obituaries placed in Jordanian and British newspapers. It aims at exploration of the impact of some...

This study investigates how people from different cultures negotiate meanings in email interactions. The data is composed of 120 emails written by two groups of students: sixty emails are written by Jordanian university students and sixty by American university students. The emails are supposed to be written to hypothetical friends. The data were a...

Many approaches have been introduced to solve the authorship verification problem, including the use of machine learning techniques. These techniques proved to be effective in detecting a person’s distinctive way of speaking or writing. The main aim of this study was to show that every writer has an idiolect which is presented through the use of se...

Many approaches have been introduced to solve the authorship verification problem, including the use of machine learning techniques. These techniques proved to be effective in detecting a person's distinctive way of speaking or writing. The main aim of this study was to show that every writer has an idiolect which is presented through the use of se...

Just like the case in many parts of the world, second language education has been accorded much importance in the Middle East and North Africa. This chapter is intended to serve two main purposes: (1) to survey progress and problems in the development of second language education in the Middle East and North Africa and (2) to look at some of the po...

Just like the case in many parts of the world, second language education has been accorded much importance in the Middle East and North Africa. This chapter is intended to serve two main purposes: (1) to survey progress and problems in the development of second language education in the Middle East and North Africa and (2) to look at some of the po...

By the end of the twentieth century certain new media had established themselves which have profoundly changed communication among lovers. SMS and email in particular have created new relational forms and forms of intimacy. From declarations of love on talk shows to televised dating games and marriage quiz shows, television offers a panoply of wild...

This study investigates politeness in the Holy Quran from a socio-pragmatic perspective. Drawing on politeness theory, we examine the text-building mechanisms and functions of a large number of chapters and verses selected from the Holy Quran. Data is analyzed in terms of both Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness and Leech's maxims of politene...

The phenomenon of linguistic taboo has not been adequately explained in sociolinguistic theory. This paper attempts to bring this phenomenon into focus by investigating it in terms of its relationship with the social context in which it is used and the socio‐cultural factors affecting it—education, age, setting and topic. Linguistic taboo is examin...

The purpose of this paper is to determine if the Druze dialect and culture are in a process of being transformed and assimilated or if they are being maintained among a generational cross-section of 131 Druze respondents in the Jordanian village of Umm Al-Quttain. In this study, the data was collected by means of a questionnaire and participant int...

Cet article étude des problèmes et des difficultés que les traducteurs arabes rencontrent en traduisant des chansons arabes en anglais. Il s’agit que chaque culture a des caractéristiques distinctes qui le rendent différent de chaque autre culture. La communication interculturelle présente ainsi beaucoup de défis et l’un d’entre eux est la nécessit...

This paper investigates mixing Arabic and English in science lectures. The phenomenon is examined mainly with reference to frequency, grammatical categories involved, and adequacy of the syntactic constraints proposed in the literature for providing a structural description of this practice. The results show that the alternate use of the two langua...

In this paper we examine the language situation among the Gypsies of Jordan within the framework of previous theories on language maintenance and shift as proposed by Le Page, Fishman, Dorian and Kelman. The study investigates language and cultural maintenance among the Gypsies of Jordan to permit comparison of the relative influences of various so...

Le présent article identifie les disparités, omissions, écarts et énoncés impropres portant sur les termes appellatifs traduits d’arabe en anglais. Il s’avère que dans les traductions effectuées dans ce sens, mais aussi inversement, les traducteurs éprouvent quelques difficultés relatives aux termes appellatifs utilisés dans les pays arabophones. L...

This paper focuses on personal letter-writing as a mode of communication between an L2 writer and an L1 reader, a little explored discourse type, yet particularly vital and salient in the process of language teaching and learning. The corpus is composed of 120 personal letters. They are supposed to be written to British English native speakers. The...

This study provides a preliminary analysis from a pragmatic and sociolinguistic point of view, of compliment responses in Jordanian Arabic as they are used by Jordanian college students. If focuses upon the relation of the individual's sexual identify to her/his compliment behavior and the attitudes and values attached to it. The phenomenon has bee...

This paper examines the language situation among Armenians in Jordan, a small minority group inhabiting the country for the last 100 years. The Armenians of Jordan are assumed to be experiencing a kind of shift in their speech. The main aim of this study is to gauge the shift and to highlight the sociodemographic factors enhancing it. The data were...

This study provides a detailed analysis of the speech of three TV pre-senters on three TV programs, addressed to three different audiences. While it has been shown that code-selection in speech communities other than Arabic is structured, functional and rule-governed and that 'audience' is a determining factor in the process, it has not been establ...

This introductory article of the special Arab issue of Language, Culture and Curriculum is intended to provide background information on Arab society and the Arab world. It also offers some relevant information on Arabic and language teaching in this particular milieu, particularly on teaching English as a second or foreign language. An idea is als...

This study investigates joke-telling in Jordanian society from a sociolinguistic point of view. Various aspects of Jordanian jokes are examined to show how these jokes are created, what effect they might have on the hearer and what type of sociological functions they attempt to communicate. An attempt was made by the researcher to shed some light o...

This study examines congratulation and thank you announcements in Jordanian newspapers. The practice of placing personal messages of congratulations and thanks in newspapers, which is very common in Jordan, will be looked at in terms of their use by Jordanian people for the purpose of serving a number of communicative functions. The purpose of this...

This study presents an analysis of genuine cases of arguments which have originally been recorded for the purpose of provoking laughter. Although only three examples of arguments are presented here for illustration, the results of this investigation are based on a close examination of more than 50 cases of arguments. The data was studied and analyz...

This paper investigates linguistic accommodation as it reveals itself in Jordanian Arabic in terms of a number of sociological and psychological parameters. The study focuses basically upon the influence of the interlocutor sex on his/her linguistic repertoire. The data is collected from a phone-in program called ‘The radio at your service - Radio...

This paper investigates persuasion as a sociolinguistic phenomenon in Jordanian society. It focuses upon three main modes of persuasion: Trustworthiness, argument, and emotional appeal. It also explores attitudes toward a number of factors that might facilitate persuasion success, and highlights the influence of religion, heritage and other socio-c...

Electronic mediated communication is an increasingly popular form of communication among Jordanian university students. They are used for serving various communicative functions. This study was carried out with two main objectives in mind. Firstly, to determine the full extent of communication that is thereby achieved, and secondly, to see whether...