Selected Utterances from the Christian Scriptures. A Pragmatic Study (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Theology - Miscellaneous, , language: English, abstract: This research work is a pragmatic analysis of selected utterances from the Christian scriptures using the speech act theory of Searle of 1969 and Politeness theory stipulated by Brown and Levinson. The motivation for this study is the fact that the Christian scriptures has received little attention when it comes to scholarly investigations.

The work is divided into five chapters: Chapter one features the background to the study, definitions of terms, statement of problem, aim and objective of the study, significance of the study and the scope of the study. Chapter two features the review of literatures relevant to this research in terms of theory, data and area of study. Chapter three contains the exploration of the methodology and theoretical framework adopted for the study.

Chapter four features the analysis of the selected utterances into two subheadings: speech act analysis focusing on the illocutionary, and politeness analysis of the same set of utterances, which are taken from the New Testament part of the Bible, Matthew, Luke and John to be precise. After the analysis, a table is attached which summarises the research question.

Pragmatics as a level of linguistic analysis describes language from the point of view of the language users; most importantly, the choices these language users make, the constraints they encounter in using their language for social interaction and also the effect of their use of language on other participants in a speech event. This is the domain of pragmatics.

Hence, social context is considered in any pragmatics study because in any social context, the sole aim of the language is to foster communication and when talking about communication, there is always the "more than" notion - a speech saying much more than what the ordinary message may project and pragmatics bothers itself with the ability to interpret the inner message of any speech