Abstract

Abstract
Recognizing the metaphorical meaning of phrases, sentences and conversations is of great importance to avoid misunderstanding and being able to be a cooperative element in any conversation. Because weather proverbs carry, in addition to their predictive meaning as an apparent speech act, a figurative meaning embodied in certain weather proverbs such as request, warning, exhibit or exhorting ,etc. Therefore, the present study aims at testing the ability of postgraduate students to recognize speech acts implied in these proverbs. The researcher prepared a multiple choice test consists of (25) weather proverbs. The test was exposed to a number of experts and the researcher made all the modifications presented by them. After finding the validity and reliability of the test, he asked the samples to recognize speech acts hidden in weather proverbs. The study concluded that English foreign language postgraduate students achieved a slight level of recognition of speech acts in general. For the variable of gender, males and females achieved equal level of recognition of speech acts.
For the speech act of warning, English foreign language postgraduate students achieved high level of recognition more than the other two acts: exhorting and exhibit. Concerning each speech acts and according to variable of gender, females achieved higher level of recognition of both warning and exhibit than males who achieved high level of recognizing “Exhibit” speech act than females.