An Intonational Analysis of Some Ostensible Speech Acts in Iraqi Arabic

The present paper has been set up to investigate the phenomenon of ostensible speech acts in Iraqi Arabic(hence forth) depending on intonational perspectives. It aims at identifying the different intonational patterns associated to some ostensible speech acts in IA.The data of the study were tape recorded IA everyday life conversations gathered from different situations. The utterances obtained were categorized as serious and non-serious ones. An attempt was made then to provide a comprehensive description of the intonational forms associated to each utterance. The results indicated that IA speakers can be distinguished according to the degree of formality of speech acts and depending on the intonational forms they adopt .These findings predict the hypotheses of the study as to the variety of tones used.