AN ANALYSIS OF RHETORICAL RELATIONS IN SERMONS

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on an important type of human communication, that of persuasive discourse. Persuasion is perceived as an interactive communicative act of sharing meaning with the intention of changing the beliefs, attitudes and actions of the recipients. By perceiving the rhetorical structure of a piece of persuasive discourse, one understands how the message has been organized and presented to persuade. The rhetorical structure of a persuasive text can be described in terms of the rhetorical relations that link its component parts together in order to relay a convincing message. The dissertation proposes to make explicit, through an analysis of three sermons, which rhetorical relations appear to be predominant in sermons and why, and which functions these rhetorical relations appear to serve in this type of persuasive discourse. Chapter One introduces the present study by specifying the rationale, aim and approach. It also explains why sermons have been chosen for study. The brief review of literature points to the lack of research attention on the rhetorical structure of sermons from a linguistic perspective on the whole. The choice of Rhetorical Structural Theory (RST) and Maier's and Hovy's metafunctionally-motivated taxonomy as the respective instruments of textual analysis and classification of rhetorical relations is also explained. Three published sermons by well-known pastors are subjected to textual analysis using RST. An overall quantitative and functional analysis of the rhetorical relations used in the corpus then follows. Chapter Two reviews briefly sermons as a type of persuasive discourse. It explains how sermons may be classified under this category of human communication. Chapter Three describes Rhetorical Structure Theory and the metafunctionally-motivated taxonomy by Maier and Hovy, thus establishing the two frameworks for textual analysis of the sermons and classification of the rhetorical relations used in the corpus. Chapter Four presents the overall rhetorical analysis of the corpus using RST. A brief explanation of how the message is knitted together in each sermon is given. Chapter Five presents the overall quantitative and functional analysis of the rhetorical relations used in the corpus. Attempts are made to account for the various characteristics observed based on an understanding of homiletics as well as persuasion and persuasive discourse theories. In conclusion, Chapter Six summarizes the major observations of the rhetorical relations in our corpus of three sermons. Limitations in the study are also acknowledged.