Devices in English and Arabic sermons : a contrastive study

Abstract EN

Persuasion is an art and a science that has a close connection with human daily life.

From the linguistic perspective, persuasion can be accomplished by using certain devices.

These devices are called "persuasive devices".

Scholars have revealed that persuasive devices are invested in various fields of life.

To polarize people, sermonic style necessitates using a number of pereuasive devices like repetition, simile, metaphor, etc.

The present study aims at: ا) finding out common syntactic, semantic and phonological persuasive devices in English and Arabic languages.

2) showing points of similarity and difference between the two languages theoretically and practically.

The study is conducted on the basis of the following hypotheses: ا ) it is hypothesized that English and Arabic have common persuasive devices.

2) Arabic tends to be more persuasive than English .

3) The area of similarity includes the syntactic, semantic and phonological levels.

To investigate the validity of these hypotheses theses, theoretical and practical aspects have been adopted.

The theoretical aspect deals with persuasive devices at the syntactic, semantic and phonological levels.

Practically, two sennons from each language are analyzed and compared in terms of the use of persuasive devices.

The findings of the investigation prove the validity of all hypotheses.

It is also found that English sermons prefer using syntactic pereuasive devices; whereas Arabic sermons favour using the semantie ones.