Types of Speech Acts in the Apostrophe Device based on John Searle's Theory; a Case Study of Āyāt al-ʾAḥkām in the Holy Quran

علوم قرآن و حدیث

Article 7, Volume 56, Issue 1 - Serial Number 112, August 2024, Pages 155-179   

Document Type: Research Article

DOI: 10.22067/jquran.2024.80903.1466

Authors

Morteza Sadeghinezhad¹; fereshteh Afzali^{* 2}

¹MA Graduate, Department of Arabic Language Translation, Faculty of Humanities, Damghan University, Damghan, Iran

²Assistant Professor, Department of Arabic Translation, Faculty of Humanities, Damghan National University, Iran.

Abstract

"Apostrophe" (Iltifāt) means grammatical altering between the use of first, second, and third person in a sentence or consecutive sentences. It aims at examining the coherence in the Holy Quran. Speech act theory is one of the important topics in pragmatics. It conveys that a conversation includes many acts such as description, declaration, command, prohibition, prayer, wish, etc. Considering a text as an act enables religious texts experts to change the nature of the texts more systematically. John Searle is one of the theorists of this area. He has classified speech acts into representatives, directives, commissives, expressive, and declarations. In this study, based on his theory, as a linguistic discourse analysis, and by using a descriptive-analytical method, the text and context of Iltifāt verses in the Holy Quran have been examined, and the type of their acts were identified. According to the results, regarding Searle's five speech acts, in these verses, the representative and commissive acts have been used more and less than other types, respectively. Also, the verbs used in each of these speech acts are as follows: describing, emphasizing, reporting, criticizing, and granting in the representative act, offering, making a condition, asking for explanation, protestingly asking, etc. in the directive act, giving and making a pledge, and swearing in the commissive act, praising, thanking, threatening, wishing, etc. in the expressive act, and terminating and judging in the declaration act.

Keywords

Quran; Iltifāt verses; Discourse analysis; Speech act; Searle

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