Pragmatics in Iraqi University Communications and Official Announcements

This research aims to study the official discourse of Iraqi universities from a pragmatic perspective, represented by its four theories: speech acts, deixis, conversational implicature, and presupposition, and the impact these theories have on the communication process between the sender and the receiver. The study seeks to reveal this impact in announcements and speeches, contributing to the creation of a pragmatic approach in the university environment and fostering an academic and institutional communication environment to enhance institutional productivity and expedite its achievement. One of the most prominent findings of this study is highlighting the language of universities and their commitment to conveying messages with accuracy, clarity, and logic. Their announcements have an effect on recipients through the use of linguistic and non-linguistic communicative advertising tools. The study clarified that speech acts, particularly the performative acts used by the university in official documents, are not explicit in their formulation while still impacting the institutional reality. Some of these acts do not explicitly indicate a command but rather resemble a request or plea. The study also examined the potential words for achievement in university texts using Austin's method of distinguishing between definitive and potential terms, finding that some terms meet the criteria to be performative, while others do not, thus failing to achieve their intended effect.