Exploring Cohesive Devices in Religious Discourse

Abstract

This study explored the language of sermon; therefore, it examined spoken discourse. The aim was to investigate the cohesiveness or otherwise of the sermon and how the cohesive devices (if any) contribute to the logicality and understanding of the non-written text and their significance. A sermon from the WhatsApp page of Rev. Fr. Joseph Nyarko, a Catholic priest of Sunyani Diocese, was purposively selected for this study. The sample was closely analyzed through the content analysis propounded by Halliday and Hasan (1976). The findings reveled that there was cohesiveness in the sermon, and reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction, collocation and reiteration were used in the sermon to logically organized structures into meaningful discourse. This work concluded that every utterance or text, whether written or non-written, consciously or unconsciously, has unique structure and form which could be analyzed.

Keywords: Religious discourse, Sermon, Cohesion, Cohesive devices, Communication