Advisories In The Bible

Advisories are directive speech acts, which establish a group of speech acts including : admonish, advice, caution, counsel, propose, recommend, suggest, urge and warn. In advisories, what the speaker expresses, is the belief that doing a certain action is a good idea, that it is in the hearer 's interest. The speaker also expresses the intention that his belief is taken as a reason to act by the hearer. (Bach and Harnish 1979:48-49) Different types of advisories are used in the Bible to enunciate various functions, these can be represented by some Biblical verses, selected from the New Testament, the Authorized Version of the King James Bible.
Ye have heard that it hath

Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart . Mathew 5. 27- 28 This can be explained as :
I hereby warn you that whosoever looked on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. Jesus Christ warns people that those who indulge a desire, those who look on a woman to increase their lust, have already committed adultery in their hearts, and violated the commandment. This warning is not in the hearers ' best interest. Jesus Christ wants the hearers to recognize that ignoring this warning is going to be harmful to them. In this example, the speech act of warning is enunciated , and it is also implicit and indirect, as it can be expressed via a declarative sentence. The problem here is that advisories are mostly expressed implicitly and indirectly. They are often expressed through the use of declaratives and

Advisories are mostly realized through active sentences in the present tense, having the implicit second person plural form of the subject.
4. In religious texts, advisories are mostly represented indirectly, through the use of declaratives and imperatives.
5. The majority of the advisory speech acts in religious texts are implicit.
6. In the religious texts, warning and advice are used more than suggestion and urge.
1.4 Procedures
1. The textual characteristics of religious texts (represented by the English version of the New Testament) will be identified.
2. The speech act theory will be surveyed , and the focus will be on the advisory speech acts.
3. A set of felicity conditions will be set for specifying the speech acts under study, and some semantic rules will be derived from the felicity conditions for determining their illocutionary force indicating device.
4. A selection of texts with moral teachings from the English Version of the New Testament will be made.
5. A textual analysis ( a content analysis, qualitative and quantitative ) of the advisory speech acts found in the selection of the texts will be made.
6. Presenting conclusions, recommendations and suggestions for further research.

1.5