Illocutionary Function of Language in the Healing Miracles of Jesus Christ

Abstract

Apart from its expressive and communicative functions, language is used to perform certain actions in interactions. However, with the exception of Waribo-Naye (2016) who combined generic structure potential with speech acts in studying Christian marriage proceedings, existing linguistic studies on religious discourse have largely focused on the ideological constructs, generic structure potential, and sociolinguistic features of religious texts to the neglect of perfomative acts, especially with respect to the healing miracles of Jesus Christ (HMJC). This study, therefore, fills the gap by examining the illocutionary acts performed by Jesus Christ in His utterances in His healing miracles in order to establish the illocutionary force in God’s word. Twenty healing miracles were purposively selected from the Gospels of the Revised Standard Version Bible. The data was subjected to content analysis, drawing insights from the theory of speech acts. A quantitative analysis of the preponderance of the speech acts types was also carried out by working out their simple percentages. The findings reveal that the speech acts performed in the miracles are dominated by directives (63.75%), followed by constatives (30%). Instances of commissives acts (3.75%), acknowledgments (1.25%), and effectives (1.25%) are also found in the discourse. The study reinforces the claim that most human utterances are actions with illocutionary force, not mere statements.

Keywords: Illocutionary acts, utterance, religious, discourse, interactions