Speech Acts: A Pragmatic Study of "Whispering of Madness"

Modern linguistics is generally characterized, and textual linguistics in particular, by a renewing movement of concept crystallization, and applied contributions in the field of text description. It has become evident that the textual linguistics and discourse analysis have broken the boundaries of the sentence structure going beyond the text. This level of discourse has become connected to non-linguistic sciences that make the perspectives of discourse analysis a multidisciplinary science. The current study is entitled Speech Acts: A Pragmatic Study of "Whispering of Madness'. Itadopts the descriptive-analytical approach in The Worshipped Evil which is one of the short stories in the great writer Naguib Mahfouz's short story collection The Whisper of Madness. The study is concerned with what the speakers of the language do in terms of achievement, communication, and influence. The study focuses on the pragmatic analysis of the speech acts used by the characters.  Therefore, both the speaker and the addressee contribute to determine the type of work entrusted to them to be delivered to the reader. Therefore, the study presents a detailed analysis of the speech acts mentioned in The Whisper of madness, specifically in the short story The Worshipped Evil, where the latter depended on many literal meanings and connotative meanings (or the meaning of the meaning as al-Jirjani called it). The short story relied on dialogue, which is one of the most important elements of speech act theory, and it also has an effective role in showing the elements of communication, and the performative functions carried by speech acts that clarifies some ambiguous meanings. This study has relied on a number of studies and references that dealt with discourse analysis. It is divided into two parts: The first part presents a detailed analysis of speech acts in The Worshipped Evil, and the second part investigates the pragmatic context and its role in achieving the coherence and cohesion of the text.