A Critical Pragmatic Analysis of Direct Rebuttal in English and Arabic Novels

This paper is primarily concerned with investigating the critical pragmatic perspective of rebuttal in Arabic and English novels. From a critical pragmatic perspective, rebuttal has not been received enough attention. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to investigate rebuttal within the framework of the chosen model. Thus, it aims: finding out how rebutters employ positive self presentation and negative other presentation in the selected data, tracing the strategies that are employed to rebut someone's arguments, and shedding light on the different types of persuasive appeals that are utilized in the selected data to effectively rebut someone's arguments. According to the aforementioned aims, it is hypothesized that: in both English and Arabic novels, the strategies of positive – self presentation and negative other presentation are used to rebut someone's arguments, a number of impoliteness and politeness strategies are employed to rebut someone's arguments, and ethos, pathos and logos are types of persuasive appeals that are used in the selected to effectively rebut someone's arguments. The findings of the investigation provide evidence that verifies the first, second, and third hypotheses.