Defamation in English and Arabic: A Pragmatic Contrastive Study

Abstract

Defamation is one of the verbal offences in which the plaintiff is accused of a certain wrongful act by one of the ways of publicity. If that wrongful act is proved, then the accused will be punished by law or lowered by his/her home people. Defamation is surely accusing another person of a wrongful act . Accusing can be done by any spoken or written ways whether truthful or doubtful. The purpose beyond those ways is to make those accusations about the victim true in the people's mind even if they are temporarily made. The aim of this study is to elucidate if there is a similarity or a difference between English and Arabic in terms of defamation. It has been hypothesized that both languages are different from each other in terms of the topic under investigation. This study arrives at: In terms of defamation, English and Arabic are similar to each other in having speech acts, grammatical referencing, conveyed meaning, malicious meaning, and discourse structure and framing with intentionality. English defamation cases include speech acts more than Arabic defamation ones.