TITLE:
Persuasion in Jesus Christ’s Humour: A Linguistic Analysis
AUTHORS:
Riyadh Tariq Kadhim Al-Ameedi, Rufaidah Kamal Abdulmajeed
KEYWORDS:
Humour, Religion, Pragmatics, Persuasion, Linguistics Analysis, New Testament
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.6 No.2,
April
6,
2016
ABSTRACT: Believers and non-believers think that religion and humour do not go together well but in fact they are more integrative. Humour has been identified as a pathway to spiritual wisdom. It is rare to find a religion, including Christianity, that does not include laughter and humour in one form or another such as myths, rituals etc. The divine laughter and humour represent the relationship between humans and religions. It is an instrument for putting humans in their place in relation to divine beings. Humour which is not spiritual is of no significance to religion. The present study is oriented primarily towards presenting humour in Jesus Christ’s Biblical Verses in the New Testament. A linguistic analysis of selected verses is carried out by searching figures of speech, such metaphor according to Kostler (1964), as a rhetoric device, and how by its flouting Grice Maxims (1975) gives rise to laughter. Besides, following Attardo’s (1994) and Raskin’s (1985) scripts, the study discusses how the oppositeness of the real/unreal scripts clash and evoke laughter. The results show that humour in these verses is a device of persuasion since the main aim of the process of flouting Grice Maxims by the rhetorical figures of speech is to achieve persuasion.