Cursing and Blessing in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Study

Stemming from the opinion that words have power to influence humans and their relationships, cursing and blessing are chosen to be studied in this research paper. Linguistically, they have not been widely investigated in literature. In most previous studies, they have been represented as social and theological phenomena. They tended to be emotional expressions rather than declarative speech acts. The present study tries to compare them linguistically, in both English and Arabic languages, dealing with their characteristics in depth by using a descriptive method. In addition to its preliminary attempt to assign clearly the felicity conditions of blessing, this paper tries to answer the following questions: 1. Is there a significant difference between cursing in English and its counterpart in Arabic? 2. Is there a significant difference between blessing in English and its counterpart in Arabic? 3. Is there a similarity between cursing and blessing? 4. Should they be treated as linguistic routines? This paper is divided into five sections: the first examines cursing in English structurally, semantically and pragmatically. The second deals with it in Arabic. In the third section, a linguistic account is given about blessing in English with an attempt to organize its felicity conditions depending on those given for cursing within Searle Model(1969), while the fourth looks at it in Arabic. Finally, the comparison and the conclusions are given.