ABSTRACT
Employing the transitivity framework of the ideational metafunction, this study explored the language of the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew chapters 5-7, from the perspective of grammar. To ascertain the predominant process types that were used and the participants that roles were assigned to, the study used two out of the three grammatical components that the framework proposes which are the process types and the participants. This was done to show how the grammatical choices made by Jesus, in His principal sermon to His followers reveal His experience of the world around and within Him. The analysis illustrates that the predominant participants are the goal-participants; the participants affected by the action of the verb. The predominant process type is the material process. The distribution of the process types also reveal that the verbal process can be considered as a major process type. On the whole, the world of the text that was revealed through the data was a world characterised by social issues such as marriage, peaceful coexistence, divorce and adultery; religious issues such as prayer, giving, trusting, a world of the knowledge and practice of the old law and a world of suffering and social vices such as murdering, violence and persecution. To be able to achieve the communicative purpose of persuading, Jesus exhibited His knowledge about these issues and as a result addressed them in the sermon and made some promises to persuade the followers to change their bad ways for the better.
CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Introduction
This study explores the language of the Sermon on the Mount as delivered by Jesus from the perspective of grammar. Using Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG hereafter), the study will find out how Jesus’ grammatical choices construe His experience of the world around and within Him. This chapter discusses the general overview of this research and gives a brief theoretical and methodological framework within which the study was conducted.
Background to the Study
Language is a very effective tool used to state facts, ask questions, give commands or give information among other uses. Anybody who uses language uses it in a way that they can do things with it; how they can make choices that will communicate their originally intended purpose or meaning. Bloor and Bloor (2004) affirm this when they say that “when people use language, their language acts produce – construct meaning” (p. 2). Also, Wood and Kroger (2000) believe that language should not be taken simply as a tool for description and a medium of communication but as a social practice, a way of doing things. Halliday (1985, xiv), writes that “a language is interpreted as a system of meanings, accompanied by forms through which the meanings can be realized and answer the question, “how are these meanings expressed?” When language performs these functions, it is said to be functional rather than formal.
The intended purpose for which the language is used defines the style to be adopted. In the religious domain for instance, speakers or users of religious language use language to convince, persuade, educate and inform etc. but chiefly to persuade. Accordingly, users of religious language tend to use language in a functional way that assists them achieve this purpose. With
these goals, intentions and beliefs in mind, they make certain linguistic choices that aid their anticipated desire.
One framework that is oriented towards describing the functions of language in texts is Halliday’s SFG. It concerns itself with meaning and language as a social phenomenon. Halliday (1978) says that language is controlled by social structures and these social structures are maintained and transmitted through language, making language very vital in the affairs of every speech community. SFG has been used extensively by scholars to analyse different kinds of texts. de Carvalho Figueiredo (1999) used it to analyse legal proceedings while Frimpong (2007) and Bonney (2008) used it to analyse editorials of newspapers. Al Faki (2014) and Adjei & Ewusi- Mensah (2016), on the other hand, used it to analyse political speeches while Halliday (1971), Burton (1982), Mwinlaaru (2012) and Cunanan (2011) used it to analyse literary texts. Graber (2001) used it to analyse the Parable of the Sower and Quainoo (2011) used it together with Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse what he calls “charismatic church advertisement sermons” in Ghana.
The interest of the current study, therefore, is to explore the application of the transitivity framework within the ideational metafunction of SFG to the Sermon on the Mount. By exploring transitivity in this text consequently, the study seeks to find out the process types and the participants that are predominant in the text. It is anticipated that the pattern that will be revealed will give a projection of the human experience in the field of the Sermon on the Mount.
Eggins (2004) says that transitivity helps to explain how the field of the situation is being constructed as in describing what is being talked about and how shifts in the field are achieved.
Halliday (1994) identifies transitivity as follows:
A fundamental property of language is that it enables human beings to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense of their experience of what goes on around them and inside them. …Our most powerful conception of reality is that it consists of “goings-on”: of doing, happening, feeling, being. These goings-on are sorted out in the semantic system of language, and expressed through the grammar of the clause… This… is the system of TRANSITIVITY. Transitivity specifies the different types of processes that are recognised in the language and the structures by which they are expressed (1994:106)
The use of transitivity analysis, therefore, reveals the fact that language structures can produce certain meanings and ideology which are not always overt for readers in texts and hearers in spoken language. This is to say that a functional analysis of language, helps to determine the connection between meanings and phrasings that account for the putting together of linguistic features in a text. It is within this framework that a speaker or writer is able to encode his/her experiences of the real world and the world of their consciousness i.e. the world within and around them. This explains why the transitivity framework is also referred to as the experiential meaning. It is a vital tool available for researchers when they want to analyse the content of a message as presented by a writer or speaker. Transitivity model is also useful as it helps in locating the participants involved, how the speaker/writer locate himself/herself in relation to others, and to discover who takes an active or passive role in the communication.
The Bible can be considered a source of linguistic data. However, since the whole Bible cannot be explored within the scope of the current study, the Sermon on the Mount found only in Matthew’s Gospel chapters 5, 6 and 7, towards the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry has been selected for this study. This sermon is considered as Jesus’ principal instruction for His followers. Stott (1978) for instance records in the author’s preface that the Sermon on the Mount presents the quintessence of the teaching of Jesus. He further makes reference to John Donne’s 1629 Lent message in which he said that:
“As nature hath given us certain elements, and all our bodies are composed of them; and art hath given us a certain alphabet of letters, and all words are composed of them; so, our blessed Saviour, in these three chapters of this Gospel, hath given us a sermon of texts, of which, all our sermons may be composed. All the articles of our religion, all the canons of our Church, all the injunctions of our princes, all the homilies of our fathers, all the body of divinity, is in these three chapters, in this one Sermon in the Mount”.
In other words, the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ major instruction for His followers and may be considered as the most important text in the Bible which is the core of Christianity that even today,
Christians see it as their foundation or code of ethics.
Statement of the Problem
As stated earlier, language is a means through which people in a given community communicate with each other. It helps speakers to get their listeners to do what they want them to do. Church leaders are not left out in the use of language. Often times, church leaders use language to persuade their members by assigning roles using certain processes to get their members to do what they want them to do. It is for this reason that Coker (2010) looked at persuasion and sermonic discourse using a Ghanaian charismatic church as the case study. Using Aristotle’s theory of persuasion, the study affirmed that persuasion occurs in sermons.
Religious discourse has attracted an appreciable amount of academic attention. There has been analysis of speeches, sermons and texts by various religious leaders to decipher the structure and function of language used in the religious domain. Most of the literature on sermonic language and sermon delivery, (Taiwo, 2007; Pieterse, 2010; Park, 2010; Adedun & Mekiliuwa, 2010),
have looked at sermons from the perspective of Discourse Analysis, Stylistics and the forms and content of the sermonic text. Studies such as (Taiwo, 2005; Bankole & Ayoola, 2014) have also focused on the textual analysis of the sermonic texts with respect to the system of Mood of the language and how preachers construe meaning interpersonally in respect of their grammatical choices. All these studies used sermons of pastors or preachers who preach about Jesus and some conclusions have been arrived at regarding the choices they make. However, how did Jesus himself, around whom these preachers preach, construe His experience of the world within and around Him in His principal sermon to His followers? Though there are studies that have looked at the Sermon on the Mount, they looked at it in bits and not the whole sermon or they focused on the theological issues (Adjei, Ewusi-Mensah, & Logogy, 2016; Kodjak, 2014; Pelikan, 2001). This study therefore through the functional use of language attempts to examine the entire Sermon on the Mount rather than portions of it.
Overall objectives of the Study
This study seeks to explore the language of the Sermon on the Mount from the perspective of grammar by considering the roles that are assigned and the process types that are used by Jesus. This study looks at how the grammatical choices made by Jesus Himself, the leader of Christianity, in His principal sermon to His followers reveal His experience of the world around and within Him. The study seeks to answer the following:
