A Critical Pragmatic Approach To Muslim Preachers’ Sectarian Discourse In English Contexts

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2021 in the subject Speech Science / Linguistics, grade: 88, University of Babylon (College of Humanities), language: English, abstract: This study is concerned with sectarianism as a social and pragmatic act which is critically manifested by the Sunni and Shiite preachers, for which a critical pragmatic approach of analysis is introduced. It addresses how sectarian discourse, which is issued by the British and American Muslim preachers, is pragmatically conveyed and how to reproduce such sectarian discourse in order to de-sectarianize it. Certain relevant questions are raised. These questions are related to the defining criteria, ideological forms and strategies of the sectarian discourse, the pragmatic strategies, the critical pragmatic mechanisms, socio-cultural aspects used by Muslim preachers in British and American different communities to indoctrinate sectarianism, and others. The study attempts to develop a model to investigate its aims, which are concerned with providing the most frequent linguistic criteria, discovering the ideological forms and strategies, pinpointing the most outstanding pragmatic strategies, discovering the socio-cultural dimensions and variables, identifying the pragmatic functions of sectarianism and finding out the similarities and differences between the British and American contexts. These aims can be reached out through certain procedures which can be briefed as follows: reviewing the literature about criticality in pragmatics, setting operational definitions, presenting an account about the concept of sectarianism among Muslim communities, and a workable model is developed to analyze the data which are selected randomly from both of the British and the American contexts. This study introduces practical conclusions. Muslim preachers adopt ideological strategies to convey sectarianism; pragmatics plays a key role in interpreting the act of sectarian discourse critically; the preachers use socio-cultural factors as represented by the principles of politeness and impoliteness to indoctrinate and sectarianize the audience; and the British and American preachers use different identifying criteria and contextual factors.