A Pragmatic Analysis of Deixis in a Religious Text

Abstract

This research tackles the pragmatic analysis of deixis in a religious text. It aims at: 1) Identifying and showing the occurrences of deixis in the religious text. 2) Finding out the most dominant type of deixis in the text. 3) Analyzing the reasons behind using these types of deixis and how they affect the audience who hear or read the speech. The source of data was taken from a religious lecture presented by Imam John Starling at Queens College in 22/10/2014 about imaan (faith) which is taken as a sample. The procedure followed in this research was reading and writing down the deictic expressions: person, place and time deixis. The findings showed that person deixis occurred for 202 times, place deixis for 11 times and time deixis for 6 times only, which indicates that the most dominant type is person deixis. After analyzing the three types of deixis in this text, the researcher has concluded that the reason behind the frequent use of person deixis could be due to the particularity of the religious texts which are centered on the Divine Entity, thus the speakers/writers always making a reference to God by using the third person pronoun ‘He’. In addition, this kind of texts is usually about guidance and advice, therefore, the pronoun ‘You’ also occurs frequently to address the audience directly and to draw their attention. And since the adviser (imam) wants to make his audience feel that he belongs to them and shares with them the same destiny, he used the pronouns ‘We’ and ‘Us’. In return, place and time deixis are very few in this text and occurred mostly during narrating some stories and setting some examples.