Abstract
Advice-giving is an everyday activity in personal or professional settings. Advice-giving is a central activity in Islamic teaching, and it has become an essential part of the Islamic practice. This thesis investigates the expression of advice-giving in a corpus of Islamic sermons online, the Islamic Sermons Online (ISO) corpus, which consists of sermons on the theme of family delivered by ten men and ten women Islamic preachers. This study examines gender in examining advice-giving in the ISO (Islamic Sermons Online) corpus. The sermons were delivered in various settings, such as in khutbah Friday prayer services in the mosque or Islamic conferences in halls and auditoriums across four continents namely Europe, America, Australia, and Asia.This research employs a mixed-methods approach. My study involves both quantitative (frequency, Ngram and keyword analysis) and qualitative approaches (discourse and pragmatics interpretation). To investigate advice speech acts, I consulted existing frameworks on advice-giving (Morrow 2012, DeCapua and Dunham 2012, Shaw et al. 2015, and Poldvere et al. 2022) and adapted them for the online sermon context. An iterative inter-rater reliability test was conducted to improve the advice framework's reliability.
The frequent word and keyword analyses in the ISO corpus suggest that the men preachers deliver sermons focusing more on parenting, whereas the women preachers advise the audience principally about married life. The men preachers tend to use words from the Quran in their sermons whereas the women preachers seem to quote the Hadith more frequently in their sermons. Islamic terms appear regularly in the ISO corpus, showing the importance of Arabic as a sacred language and indicating the preachers targeted audiences from Muslim communities.
Four sample sermons delivered by two men preachers and two women preachers were chosen as case studies to explore the detailed structure of the sermons and apply my advice framework. The findings in the four case studies show that the two women preachers employ relatively more imperatives and modals/semi-modals than the men preachers. Among the four case studies, employing sacred texts is the dominant choice for indirect advice using hints. The stories of Luqman and Ibrahim from the Quran are essential for the two men preachers to deliver advice, whereas these stories do not appear in sermons delivered by the two women preachers. These findings in the case studies are continued through the whole ISO corpus, where some individual variation is also seen.
Analysis of advice speech act realisation in the ISO corpus shows that direct and indirect advice was relatively balanced in sermons delivered by the men and women preachers. The analysis finds that the women preachers generally have a preference to use more direct advice than the men preachers. They also tend to use the pronoun “we” as preferred direct advice involving modals or semi-modals than the men preachers. The direct advice that was popular might be seen in the authority of the preachers toward the audience, the clarity of the message, and the belief that giving advice is an act of care or help. The image of the authority of the preachers was seen in their elevated physical position above the audience and delivered their sermons a distance from the audience.
The frequent use of indirect advice by using hints demonstrates the preachers’ awareness of the importance of saving the face of the audience. The hint strategy does not provide clear instructions on what the audiences need to do, so this hint strategy is usually not easy to identify. In hint strategy, delivering advice through quoting sacred texts and telling stories are the most popular. The men preachers regularly quote the Quran and narrate stories from the Quran to motivate parents to connect and engage their children. The women preachers regularly quote the Hadith and related stories from the Hadith to advise a spouse to love, support, and connect with their spouses.
The sermons delivered during the khutbah in Friday prayer services, regular sermons delivered in the mosque or sermons at conferences generally have a similar structure. Location or type of sermons does not influence the way of the preachers in realisations of advice strategies.
This research on advice expressions contributes to studying advice speech acts related to gender. This thesis offers a comprehensive framework for advice-giving that can be effectively utilised in monolog contexts. It is anticipated that this thesis will be helpful to those interested in theolinguistics who want to know the features of Islamic sermons and an alternative source of public speaking material in English for Islamic Studies.
| Date of Award | May 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Sheena Gardner (Supervisor), Benet Vincent (Supervisor) & Sarah Turner (Supervisor) |