This paper tackles how speech acts offer deep insights into the social structure in poetic text. Most relevant research on poetic speech acts has shed much light on Western speech and literature, neglecting the speech act behavior of Arabic literature, particularly poetry. This study aimed to treat the effect of cultural aspects on the production of main speech acts in Al-Jawahiri's masterpiece 'O Sir! Inspire Me’. Relying on Searle's classification of main speech acts and the findings of analysis, the results show that the poet Al-Jawahiri utilizes more representative and expressive speech acts in his poem to enhance that what he presents is a fact to be believed concerning the praise and description of the king, His Majesty Hussein bin Talal, on the one hand, and his heartfelt love and emotion towards the king, on the other. This is also accompanied by the findings that there is an association between the socio-cultural aspects and the production of speech acts in poetic texts. Islam, Arabism and prestigious ancestry are factors that have been found to play an important role in defining the cultural norms of the production of main speech acts in the poem under scrutiny.
Musaab A. Raheem Al-Khazaali, Hussein Dhahi Muzhir, Hussam Rashid H. Jarullah
main speech acts, poetic text, Searle’s taxonomy, socio-cultural aspects.