A Linguistic Study of Preaching

Abstract

Advice-giving is a common activity that occurs between friends, family members, or between professionals and lay people in written or spoken form, in face-to-face situations or in mediated forms of communication. According to Miller (2010: 11), the act of advice-giving in a religious context is called preaching. In spite of the importance of this topic, it has not been given due research attention. Thus, this study sets itself the task of dealing with preaching in religious contexts. Precisely, the study attempts to answer the following questions: (1) How is preaching defined? (2) What are the linguistic realizations of the act of preaching in the analyzed data? (3) What are the felicity conditions of the act of preaching? And (4) Through which strategies is preaching realized in the data under preview? In other words, this study aims at shedding light on the act of preaching through investigating it at three linguistic levels: semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic in some selected speeches by Al-Imam Al-Hasan (peace be upon him). In accordance with these aims, it is hypothesized that (1) Preaching usually takes the form of an imperative, whether positive or negative, (2) Pragmatically, preaching is best issued via direct strategies to urge the targets to consider it seriously. In order to achieve the aims of the study and verify or reject its hypothesis, a model is developed for the analysis of the data under examination. Besides, a statistical means represented by the percentage equation is used to calculate the results.