Deixis in English Islamic Friday sermons: A pragma-discourse analysis

Asim Ayed Alkhawaldeh

doi:10.24815/siele.v9i1.21415

Abstract

Although deixis has received increasingly academic attention in linguistic research, its use in sermons, particularly in the Islamic context, has been largely underexplored. Therefore, this paper examined deixis in Islamic Friday sermons from the perspective of pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on Levinson’s Framework, it aimed at analyzing three main types of deixis (personal, temporal, and spatial), focusing on their forms, features, functions, and frequency. The data were a corpus of 70 sermons compiled by the researcher from various online websites. The study employed qualitative and quantitative methods to meet the purpose of the study. The findings revealed that these three deictic types were relatively common in the language of the respective corpus with the personal type being predominant, deictically pointing to different referents whose interpretation was sensitive to the context in which they occurred. As an affectively powerful tool in the corpus, the preachers utilized deixis to serve a wide variety of functions on the discourse and pragmatic levels. In the corpus, deictic expressions worked as a discourse strategy to persuade the listeners by drawing their attention and engaging them in the message of the sermon and to signal and organize the flow of information in the ongoing discourse. They also served to enhance togetherness, intimacy, and politeness between the preachers and their audience. This study is hoped to present a good basis for further linguistic investigation of deixis in other languages and religions to illuminate how deictics work in sermonic discourse.

Highlights

As a universal linguistic phenomenon, deixis is held to be ubiquitous and a pervasive feature of daily talk and writing in all-natural languages that every human language employs to point to objects in context (Levinson, 2006)
The study of deixis is of paramount importance to linguistic research, pragmatics and discourse studies because it reflects the aspects of inevitable intersection and interaction between the linguistic form and the context in which speech or talk takes place, how participants encode and decode this phenomenon (O’Keeffe et al, 2011)
The first deictic category to be examined in this study is person deixis concerned with speech participants involved in the act of utterance

Summary

Introduction

As a universal linguistic phenomenon, deixis is held to be ubiquitous and a pervasive feature of daily talk and writing in all-natural languages that every human language employs to point to objects in context (Levinson, 2006) It concerns the ways in which language encodes the features of context of an utterance and the ways in which the interpretation of deictics depends on the analysis of the context in which they are used, reflecting the relationship between the language and context (Levinson, 1983). There is a variety of expressions varying in forms and functions in different languages that carry a deictic usage, where the role of context is pivotal in figuring out their reference (Mey, 2001) Put it differently, context as a constantly changing setting enables interlocutors in the process of communication to interact and make their use of deictics intelligible, giving them the intended pragmatic meaning. There is a subtle dividing line between deictic and non-deictic expressions whereby some expressions can serve both deictic and non-deictic functions according to context

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