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.

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. viii 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 ix 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.

A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION IN SELECTED SERMONS OF WILLIAM KUMUYI.