Greetings and Partings in Iraqi and Jordanian Arabic

Like many other politeness formulas, greetings and partings in several languages have received considerable attention from practitioners of ‘language-in-use’ at the dyadic level, with and/or without the inclusion of a mediator between sender and receiver, e.g., ‘Say hello to Bob for me, will you?', where pragmatic consequences are foreseeable. Some greeting expressions are treated as belonging to the courtesy system of Baghdadi Arabic in the light of what could be called ‘marked’ or ‘unmarked’ without losing sight of the elaboration/attenuation distinction. A plain greeting formula is devoid of any courteous force and, hence, conventionally ‘unmarked’, whereas a courteous greeting is conversationally ‘marked’ but without necessarily involving a one-to-one correspondence with ‘attenuation’ and ‘elaboration’, respectively.