A Discourse Analysis Of Jesus’ Conversation With The Samaritan Woman

It is a known fact that Discourse Analysis is the analysis of language in use. This work shaowed how discourse analysis and pragmatic elements can be used in decoding facts and foregrounded information in the Holy Bible especially Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman. The discourse elements such as: participants, context, turn-taking, exchange structure, reference, presupposition, inference, intention were used to bring out the foregrounded information in the conversation. In conclusion, we were able to show that addressee deduced or inferred more information from addressor’s utterance beyond what the original intention might have been.

Title pagei

Certificationii

Dedicationv

Acknowledgmentvi

Abstractvii

CHAPTER ONE

1.1General Introduction1

1.2Purpose2

1.3Scope and delimitation2

1.4Justification3

1.5Methodology3

 CHAPTER TWO

2.1 Introduction4

2.2 Discourse4

2.3 Discourse Analysis5

2.4 Elements of discourse analysis8

2.4.1Participants8

2.4.2 Context8

2.4.3 Turn-taking11

2.4.4 Exchange structure12

2.4.4.1 Initiation, response and feedback12

2.4.4.2 Adjacency pairs13

2.4.5 Topic13

2.5 Pragmatic concepts of discourse14

   2.5.1 Presupposition14

2.5.2 Implicature15

2.5.3 Reference17

2.5.4 Inference18

2.5.5 Intention18

2.6 Data description19

2.6.1 Jesus Christ20

2.6.2 The Samaritan woman20.

CHAPTER THREE

3.1 Introduction21

3.2 Datum 121

3.3 Datum 227

3.4 Datum 331

CHAPTER FOUR

4.1 Summary37

4.2 Findings38

Bibliography41

Over the years, several researches have been conducted in the field of discourse analysis with various definitions given to it. Brown and Yule (1983:1) opine that “the analysis of discourse is necessarily the analysis of language in use”.

Ambiguity is the word used by Stubb (1993:1) to describe discourse analysis. He says; “the term discourse analysis is very ambiguous…to refer to mainly the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected spoken or written discourse”.

Cooks (1996:1) argues that “although the main focus of discourse analysis is on language, it is not concerned with language alone. It also examines the concept of communication”.

Discourse analysis has been applied to the analysis of many literary works by scholars. Cooks (1996) uses discourse analysis to analyze advertisement. Woods (2006) examines the discourse of advertising, politics, law, medicine and the discourse of education respectively. Laniru (2010) uses it for “who wants to be a millionaire,” a television program in Nigeria.

This investigation is an attempt to take discourse analysis some steps further, using its basic elements such as turn taking, exchange structure, context, participants and so on, alongside some pragmatic features to make explicit the implicit aspect of the interaction between our participants, Jesus and the Samaritan woman as recorded in John chapter four of the holy Bible. Our expectation is that this will give a better understanding and insight into the conversation.