Dr Reza Arab
English as an International Language Major Convenor
Lecturer
School of Languages and Cultures
+61 7 344 34834
Researcher biography
Dr Reza Arab is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the School of Languages and Cultures. His expertise lies in pragmatics, cultural linguistics, and intercultural communication, with a focus on how humour, metaphor, and language practices shape belonging, identity, and interaction across cultural and institutional contexts.
His research spans historical pragmatics, contrastive semantics, and discourse analysis, particularly in national and Indigenous settings. He has led and contributed to projects on humour in prison discourse, media representations, and political communication. Dr Arab is also the major convenor for English as an International Language (EIL) at UQ.
Book Chapters
Arab, Reza (2024). Metapragmatics of Maze (Taste) in Persian. The Handbook of Cultural Linguistics. (pp. 383-405) edited by Alireza Korangy. Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-99-3800-1_18
Arab, Reza (2019). Ethnopragmatics of Hāzer Jāvabi, a valued speech practice in Persian. Studies in ethnopragmatics, cultural semantics, and intercultural communication: Ethnopragmatics and semantic analysis. (pp. 75-94) edited by Kerry Mullan, Bert Peeters and Lauren Sadow. Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-32-9983-2_5
Journal Articles
Arab, Reza (2025). The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts, written by Esther Linares-Bernabéu. Contrastive Pragmatics, 1-5. doi: 10.1163/26660393-bja10147
Rarrick, Samantha and Arab, Reza (2025). Contextual clips: prioritizing neglected recordings in corpora. Language Documentation and Conservation, 19, 67-81.
Delshad, Parvin, Ball, Lauren and Arab, Reza (2024). Medical certificates: more than just paperwork. Australian Journal of General Practice, 53 (11 Supplement), S123-S127. doi: 10.31128/AJGP-02-24-7154
Arab, Reza (2024). Epistemic sentence-initial constructions as incongruity markers English “it is ironic [that]” vs Persian “bāmaze ast [ke]”. International Review of Pragmatics, 16 (2), 232-253. doi: 10.1163/18773109-01602003
Arab, Reza (2023). Book review: Thielemann, Nadine (2020). Understanding Conversational Joking: A Cognitive-pragmatic Study Based on Russian Interactions. John Benjamins.. European Journal of Humour Research, 11 (4), 128-132.
Lovell, Sue and Arab, Reza (2022). Evaluating the credibility of storied matter in the context of agential realism. Angelaki, 27 (6), 50-66. doi: 10.1080/0969725x.2022.2139018
Arab, Reza (2022). Cultural semantics of the ‘salt’ word in Persian. International Journal of Language and Culture, 9 (1), 119-150. doi: 10.1075/ijolc.21038.ara
Arab, Reza and Davis, Jessica Milner (2022). Humour and belonging: a thematic review. European Journal of Humour Research, 10 (2), 1-13.
Arab, Reza (2016). A review of agency and structure: Where does Rorty’s Ironist stand?. European Scientific Journal, 12 (8), 36-51. doi: 10.19044/esj.2016.v12n8p36
Conference Papers
Arab, Reza and Rarrick, Samantha (2025). Pragmatics of Tok Pilai in Kere. 19th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA2025), Brisbane, QLD, Australia, 22 - 27 June 2025. International Pragmatics Association.
Arab, Reza (2025). Making democracy accessible: rethinking political communication for Australia’s migrant communities. Cultural Pragmatics and Migration Linguistics Symposium, Canberra, ACT, Australia, 16 June 2025.
Arab, Reza (2024). "It's funny that you've grown white": Negotiating identity and intersubjectivity on prison radios. 4th Conference on Discourse, Culture and Interaction, Brisbane, QLD Australia, 5-6 December 2024.
Arab, Reza and Anderson, Heather (2024). The language of prison radios: humour and coping. 30th Australasian Humour Studies Network Conference, Brisbane, QLD Australia, 7-9 February 2024.
Rarrick, Samantha and Arab, Reza (2023). Contextual clips as neglected (meta)data: Insights on corpora from a humorous collaboration. International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation, Hawaii, United States, 2-5 March 2023.
Arab, Reza (2018). Persian light verbs in NSM explications: some issues. Semantic Workshop 2018, Canberra, ACT Australia, 22-23 March 2018.
Arab, Reza (2017). Semantics and ethnopragmatics of hazer javabi ('ready to respond') in Persian. The Australian Linguistics Society Conference, Sydney, NSW Australia, 4-7 December 2017.
Thesis
Arab, Reza (2021). To be with salt, to speak with taste: metapragmatics of playful speech practices in Persian. PhD Thesis, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University. doi: 10.25904/1912/4079