A Corpus-Assisted Pragmatic Comparative Study of 'Boosters' in Iraqi Televised Political Interviews

Abstract

The concept of 'boosting' is dealt with and developed from a pragmatic perceptive by Janet Holmes (1984). Later, Urbanova (2003) the model of this study has adjusted this concept to be applicable to language in general. 'Boosters' are those lexical items that express the speaker's certainty towards the true value of a proposition being asserted in an utterance. Context is the major factor that determines the type or prototype of the linguistic device in use. There have been a number of researches dealing with the concept of boosting from political, scientific, pedagogical, sociological, and religious angles. However, the Arabic, namely the Iraqi discourses have not been dealt with before in any of the levels mentioned here. Consequently, this research is based on an analysis of a corpus of (10) interviews with the native Iraqi male and female politicians in which the researcher makes divergent comparisons between them, i. e; between the Iraqi male and female politicians to arrive at a convenient understanding of the difference in the orientations of the two groups conducted in this study. The results of the analysis show the different orientations of the two groups towards the use of boosting