A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF PSALM 23
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Date
2018
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Department of English, University of Ilorin, Ilorin.
Abstract
The philosophical foundation of pragmatics posits that both the intralinguistic and extralinguistic contexts cannot be trivialised in the exploration of meaning of texts. However, existing works from the perspective of pragmatics which explore how language is used to mean in Biblical texts are scanty. The purpose of this study therefore was to employ the Speech act theory proposed by Searle (1976) as well as aspects of Lawal (1997) and Bangura’s (2007) features of context like linguistic, cosmological, socio-cultural, situational and discourse deixis to discover how the writer of Psalm 23 used those aspects of pragmatics as meaning-inducing components. The analysis revealed that the writer performed especially Informative and Assertive acts to convince the audience, thereby creating plausibility for his claims and boasting. An exploration of cosmological context also revealed that he reflected Christian doctrinal positions about certain phenomena; situational-cum-socio-cultural context indicated he alluded to personal experiences in the historical background; and through discourse deixis, he alluded to events in other portions of the Scripture. Moreso, the writer exploited features of person deixis to identify and assign roles to discourse participants; while through linguistic context, elements such as modal verbs and sentence structures were used as pragmatic devices to accentuate meaning. On the basis of these discoveries, it was concluded that meanings of Biblical utterances are not locally absolute in the immediate linguistic contexts of the utterances but are also anchored to the inexhaustible contextual sources external to the utterances. Therefore, the significance of pragmatics to this study is that it provides effective mechanisms for unveiling how language is used to mean in Biblical texts.
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Olaleye, J. I., & Alabi, V. A. (2018). A Pragmatic Analysis of Psalm 23. Ilorin Journal of English Studies, 4. 36-56.