摘要
Sermon as a religious discourse thrives on the use of prosodic features which give extra information to enhance understanding of utterances in oral discourse. This paper investigates the prosodic innovations that manifest in the sermons of selected Pentecostal pastors in Southwest Nigeria. It also identifies some prosodic features in the selected sermons and relates them to their themes. Data was sourced from one sermon-VCD tape each by Pastors Kumuyi(Inf-Kum), Adeboye(Inf-Adeb) and Bishop Oyedepo(Inf-Oyed). The tapes were played back to extract some prosodic features in the sermons;these were analyzed using the pitch extraction software, PRAAT. Analyses of the data reveal that preachers put extra prosodic force on some words in order to emphasize the focus of their messages. But while Inf-Oyed and Inf-Adeb use higher pitch for accented words and lower pitch for non-accented, Inf-Kum uses the same pitch of voice for both. Additionally, the subjects’ vowel length(SV-L) rendition appeared longer than what obtains in native English. Moreover, there are specific prosodic features characterizing each preacher’s doctrinal persuasions: Inf-Oyed deploys emphatic stress with enthusiastic voice;Info-Kum uses a relatively same level of voice pitch while Info-Adeb’s renditions are generally slower in tempo. The paper concludes that Nigerian Pentecostal sermons are replete with prosodic features deployed for achieving thematization of messages and doctrinal identity construction.
Sermon as a religious discourse thrives on the use of prosodic features which give extra information to enhance understanding of utterances in oral discourse. This paper investigates the prosodic innovations that manifest in the sermons of selected Pentecostal pastors in Southwest Nigeria. It also identifies some prosodic features in the selected sermons and relates them to their themes. Data was sourced from one sermon-VCD tape each by Pastors Kumuyi(Inf-Kum), Adeboye(Inf-Adeb) and Bishop Oyedepo(Inf-Oyed). The tapes were played back to extract some prosodic features in the sermons; these were analyzed using the pitch extraction software, PRAAT. Analyses of the data reveal that preachers put extra prosodic force on some words in order to emphasize the focus of their messages. But while Inf-Oyed and Inf-Adeb use higher pitch for accented words and lower pitch for non-accented, Inf-Kum uses the same pitch of voice for both. Additionally, the subjects’ vowel length(SV-L) rendition appeared longer than what obtains in native English. Moreover, there are specific prosodic features characterizing each preacher’s doctrinal persuasions: Inf-Oyed deploys emphatic stress with enthusiastic voice; Info-Kum uses a relatively same level of voice pitch while Info-Adeb’s renditions are generally slower in tempo. The paper concludes that Nigerian Pentecostal sermons are replete with prosodic features deployed for achieving thematization of messages and doctrinal identity construction.
