A Comparative Study of Illocutionary Speech Acts in Makki and Madni Sarahs of the Holy Quran

Abstract

The research project aims to compare Makki and Madni Surahs of the Holy Quran on the basis of speech act realization. The purpose of the study is to inquire to what extent the illocutionary speech act realization is different in both Makki and Madni Surahs of the Holy Quran. For the purpose of conducting the present research, two Surahs of the Holy Quran, one from Makki Surahs An Nahal and one from Madni Surahs Tawbah were chosen and a corpus of their translation was developed. Searle’s(Searle & Searle, 1969) speech act theory was used as theoretical model which categorizes speech acts into five categories namely assertive, expressive, directives, declaratives and commissive. A list of all possible verbs was compiled which come into the speech acts categories. The results at lexical level show that assertive speech acts are the most frequently used speech acts in both Surahs. There are some variations based on directive speech acts as the language of Makki Surah is less directive then Madni. The findings of the study can further help investigate a larger set of data from religious texts.