Cohesion in spoken discourse – a study of selected church sermons

Abstract

This work studies the language of sermons. The work looks into spoken discourse. It investigates cohesion in sermons by examining cohesive devices in the utterances of selected sermons and how these devices contribute to the logic and understanding of non-written texts. It examines cohesive devices that make the utterances of church sermons semantically and logically significant. Five samples of church sermons are selected for this study. The samples are closely analyzed through content analysis based on the utterances of the clergy. The study discloses how utterances are logically organized into meaningful structures due to the usage of cohesive devices in the discourse. Those devices were propounded by Halliday and Hasan (1996) and they include reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunction, collocation and reiteration. This work finally discloses the fact that every utterance or text, whether written or non-written, consciously or unconsciously, has unique structure and form which could be analyzed.