A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION IN SELECTED SERMONS OF WILLIAM KUMUYI.
A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION IN SELECTED SERMONS OF WILLIAM KUMUYI.
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Date
1999-03
Authors
BAHAGO, SHAWA1
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Abstract
ABSTRACT
This was a pragmatic study of the naturally occurring speech situation
from sermons in the church context. The study involved a detailed
consideration of the various contextual features necessary for the
understanding of discourse by identifying, classifying and systematically
interpreting the various illocutionary forces behind the utterances of the
pastor in the sermons.
The investigation was anchored on the following assumptions:
(1) That religious language deviates from normal linguistic usage.
(2) In everyday religious context, words which in other situation would
seem meaningless, absurd, or self-contradictory can be accepted as
potentially meaningful.
(3) That in Christian religious context, words that make up utterances
operate on a different level of meaning, conveying different
associations within and outside church situation.
(4) That to be effective in this kind of communication, the users of
language, (the pastor and the congregation) must depend heavily on
contextual features.
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The results confirmed these assumptions.
The finding from this study provides important pragmatic points of
understanding interactional discourse.
They include the following:
(i) Contextual features are most relevant to the production and
interpretation of speech.
(ii) The ability to compose sentences is not the only ability needed to
communicate. Communication only takes place if the pastor
(speaker) make use of different acts of an essentially social nature.
Thus the pastor does not communicate by composing sentences, but
by using sentences to make statements of different kinds.
(iii) The pastor as well as the congregation are faced with pragmatic
constraints which are binding just as syntactic and phonological
constraints.
(iv) There are other aspects of meaning which the congregation derived
that arc not taken solely from the meanings of words used by the
pastor (speaker). When the congregation (hearer(s)) hear pieces of
language, they normally try to understand not only what the word
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mean, but what the pastor (speaker) intended to convey (illocutionary
force).
The study arrived at such findings by integrating Austin and
Searle's theory of speech acts and Grice's account of communication.
The study adopted an eclectic model of analysis to determine the
illocutionary force of utterances and any implicated message intended
by the pastor based on the shared assumptions or knowledge with the
congregation. The illocutionary force of utterances, thus is part of the
total message implicated.
Description
A TMESIS SUBMITTED TO THE POST GRADUATE SCHOOL, AHMADU
BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENT FOR AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN
ENGLISH LANGUAGE, IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, FACULTY OF
ARTS, AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA
Keywords
PRAGMATIC,, ANALYSIS,, LANGUAGE,, RELIGION,, SELECTED,, SERMONS,, WILLIAM,, KUMUYI.