A Pragmatic Study On Directives Given By Jesus In The Four Gospels

This thesis explores the directives given by Jesus in The Four Gospels of The New Testament to three groups: people of low social status(downward), Jesus’ disciples(across), and people of high social status(upward).Drawing on the revised version of Ervin-Tripp’s taxonomy of directives(1976), the author collects 403 pieces of directives and then classifies them into six types: imperatives, imbedded imperatives, rhetorical question directives, permission directives, need statements, and hints. With regard to the first type---imperatives---six variants are observed: bare imperatives, ellipsis, post-posed tags, imperatives+ interpretations, let us, and you+ imperatives.The distribution and frequencies of different types of directive expressions and different variants of imperatives in the three groups are displayed. The data shows that the imperative, the most forceful directive form, is the most frequent type employed by Jesus, used more than two-thirds of the time. It is also evident that the imbedded imperative accounts for second highest usage. The hint is placed third. Nevertheless, very few cases of rhetorical question directives, permission directives, and need statements are found.As for the number of directives used by the three different groups, directives given by Jesus to the disciples are of the most frequent. The proportions of the six directive expressions used in the across group are similar to the percentages in the upward group. Different from the upward and across groups, directives are mostly realized as imperatives in the downward group, accounting for 94.64%.Directives given by Jesus to the downward are mainly physical behaviors and Now directives, in the form of imperatives. Although the imperative is still the main type, for the across group, the proportion is sharply less than the downward group. Its variants realized as the imperative+ interpretation is a bit more frequent than the bare imperative. Meanwhile, the frequency of the imbedded imperative comes higher. It can be concluded that Jesus tends to use more polite and soft ways to communicate with his disciples. Most of the occurrences of directives given to the upward group are in the situation of answering the test of the scribes and the Pharisees. These answers are so ingenious that they are also a kind of teaching to the high social status.A comparison of directives used in different tasks and the three groups shows that some factors influence the syntactic expressions. The choice of certain directive expressions with different degrees of directness are influenced by task relevance and hearer relevance, the former including the complexity of actions, the urgent settings, the particular functions and the particular task in biblical context; the latter by the social relations, the social status, the standpoint of the hearer(s), and the numbers of hearer(s). The author finds that directives given by Jesus have achieved many functions: instruction, suggestion, advice, invitation, encouragement, order, commandment, caution, warning, prohibition, and so on.After analyzing the data from a linguistic perspective, especially with pragmatic principles, the thesis examines the features and functions of different types of directives in The Four Gospels, and figures out some factors contribute to Jesus’ choice of directive expressions. This study enriches the pragmatic study of directives in the special context.