Preventive Pragmatics in Jordanian Arabic: Regulating Fear, Belief, and the Unseen

Abstract

This article examines how speakers of Jordanian Arabic pragmatically regulate discourse about supernatural entities known as jinn, treating such discourse as a socially consequential domain where fear, normativity, and belief intersect. Drawing on ethnographically grounded interactional data, the study identifies a structured repertoire of preventive pragmatic acts, including apotropaic invocations, Qurʾanic supplications, metapragmatic prohibitions on naming, affect-regulating moves, and sceptical or humorous stances. These practices function not merely as expressions of belief, but as interactional technologies for governing emotional escalation, allocating epistemic and deontic authority, and managing moral accountability in situations construed as risky. The analysis develops a sociopragmatic account of how linguistic ideologies that construe speech as causally efficacious shape what can be said, when, and by whom. By theorising jinn-related talk as a site of preventive pragmatics and semiotic world-making, the article contributes a transferable analytical framework for the study of normativity, stance-taking, and the interface between language, affect, and cosmology in everyday interaction.