A Pragmatic Analysis of Onomastic Pun in The Holy Bible
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31973/001a6q21Keywords:
The Holy Bible , Onomastics, Biblical Pun, Relevance Theory, PragmaticsAbstract
Naming puns or onomastic wordplay is an interesting variety of wordplay. It fulfils an important role in the Scriptures. This type of pun is called Biblical wordplay. Onomastics as a discipline is stemmed from the Greek word onoma meaning ‘name’. The study at hand examines this linguistic phenomenon in The Holy Bible to uncover layers of meaning in this kind of pun in English religious texts. It is a qualitative study that pragmatically approach this phenomenon and adopts Sperber and Wilson’s post-Gricean pragmatics which is called “Relevance Theory” (1995) to analyze five texts from The Holy Bible. The study concludes that meaning is encapsulated in pun words to a great extent and the core meaning of many texts will be lost if instances of onomastic pun are not understood in these English religious texts. The study shows that the most used structure to realize this kind of pun is the syntactic structure with the help of the lexical level. Furthermore, uncovering layers of meaning and comprehending religious texts in English language depend on onomastic pun to a great extent. It is proved by data analysis that instances of onomastic pun are content based in these texts.
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