ABSTRACT
Many researchers have investigated the pragmatic meanings and interpretations of religious expressions, especially in Arabic and Muslim contexts. One main property of such expressions is that they are pragmatically multi-purpose expressions whose semantic content has a peripheral contribution to the utterance while their pragmatic force is salient. In this chapter, the chapter firstly reviews the use of religious expressions as pragmatic messages with special focus on literature on Jordanian Arabic (JA). Additionally, the chapter examines the pragmatic functions and uses of one religious expression la: ʔila:ha ʔilla ʔalla:h (lit. ‘no god except Allah’) in a corpus that consists of naturally occurring conversations. The chapter shows that this religious expression serves three functions in JA discourse, namely an expressive marker (as a surprise marker or a disagreement (or rejection) marker), a turn-taking device and an information-cancelling marker. The chapter examines the interplay of the use of this religious expression with religion, culture, context, and prosody. Implications for future research are highlighted.
