Telling Martyrdom: The Linguistic Encoding of Agency, Attitude and Activity in Narratives of Martyrs’ Women (2014-2017). | ||||
| CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education | ||||
| Article 8, Volume 64, Issue 1, June 2018, Page 213-245 PDF (571.67 K) | ||||
| Document Type: Original Article | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/opde.2018.95972 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
| Nihal Nagi Sarhan Sarhan | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| The present paper aims at examining selected narratives of the mothers and wives of soldiers martyred during the struggle between Egypt and terrorists. The period following the 25th of January and 30th of June 2011 and 2013 respectively has witnessed the bloodiest surge of terrorist attacks on Egypt as a whole and on military and police officers in Sinai in particular, resulting in an average of 2000 martyrs of different ranks. As a tribute to these martyrs, their mothers and/or their wives were invited to official ceremonies to talk about their lost ones. The present paper attempts to investigate how far the language of the selected narratives encodes the narrators’ evaluation of the martyrdom event and how it reflects their emotional immersion in the narrative. Labov (1972) defines narrative as “as one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which actually occurred”. By applying Halliday’s transitivity framework (2004), the selected narratives are analysed to investigate the major participant roles as in index of agency. Using Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal theory, the present research also evaluates the attitudes of both the narrators and the martyrs towards martyrdom. Finally, the emotional expressivity realized via the narrative structure referential activity (RA) is studied to validate the emotional impact of the narratives. The primary analysis has shown that the main agents in all narratives is the martyr himself; no agency trace of the terrorists is observed. Pride and positive judgement are also the prevalent attitudes in all of the highly-weighted narratives. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| agency; attitude; referential activity; narratives; martyrdom | ||||
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