Discourse of Funerals in Religious Contexts: A Contrastive Pragma-Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

         The philosophical aspects of funeral discourse are complex and contested especially in different religious contexts. According to Cambridge dictionary funerals are as (usually religious) ceremony for burying or burning the body of a dead person. Other contributions to this definition have demonstrated how 'religion is no exception' by giving rise that religion is as a subject to some particular which has a broadly political importance in the sense of relating it to the concept of struggles for power. This study investigates the discourse used by Christians and Muslims in funerals. To the best of the researchers' knowledge there are little studies tackled this discourse in both Christianity and Islam from a pragma-stylistic perspective. It aims at finding out the aesthetic stylistic features and the speech acts that are used in each stage in Islamic Arabic and Christian English funerals and at finding out how different social conventions and rituals in funerals are reflected in the use of different stylistic features and speech acts. As a tool for stylistic analysis, this study utilizes Leech and Short (2008) for the analysis of stylistic devices in both the Christian and Islamic funerals. Besides, it makes use of Searle’s classification of speech acts for the analysis of speech acts in these two culturally different ceremonies. It is assumed that there are significant cultural and ceremonial differences and similarities between the Islamic and Christian funerals ceremonies that are reflected in the stylistic features and speech acts used in these two ceremonies. This study is significant since it sheds light on the pragmatic and stylistic structures of the Islamic and Christian funerals and their variant cultural rites.