Pragmatic Manipulation of Advisories in Biblical Proverbs

Abstract

In enunciating advisories, the speaker attempts to transferan idea that carrying out a certain act will be in the interest of the addressee and beneficial to him/her. Biblical proverbsare often observed to be rich of various advisory speech acts (such as advice, warn and urge) as they are employed as a means of persuading or influencing people. The present paper aims at the exploration of the pragmatic manipulation of advisories mentioned above in proverbs taken from the Bible. The study concludes that warning and advising speech acts are more common than that of urging, and that the most salienttrait that advisories enjoy is beneficiality; by advisories, hearers are asked to do a set of actions towards something beneficial (i.e. advice and urge) or to avoid something not beneficial for them (i.e. warning). Structurally, most advisories are realized by the use of declarative sentences, i.e. particularly, those pertinent to the speech act of advising, whereas some cases of warning and urging are realized by imperative sentences, as they give more powerful tone to the addresses to perform the action. However, warnings are often expressed in negatively valued constructions to expound the unhappy consequences of the act warned against.