Article View

Friday sermons portray patterns of lexical cohesion which can demonstrate how effective communication is achieved. This study proposes a model of lexical cohesion that fits the spoken discourse of Friday sermons in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To that end, a corpus of 25 sermons was analyzed to identify patterns of cohesion and show the impact of cohesive devices on the delivery of these sermons. The sermons were selected through purposive sampling to ensure a diverse representation of this domain. Findings show that in addition to the three categories of Arabic cohesion viz., reiteration relations, collocations and semantic relations, a novel category is introduced known as prosodic cohesion. This new category refers to the use of dynamic prosodic aspects like stress, intonation and rhyming, to create unity and to communicate ideas clearly and more efficiently. The study found that repetition is highly used in the corpus due to the root repetition system in Arabic, where one consonantal root can generate numerous words, enhancing the unity of the text and highlighting core themes. As this study is limited to a sample of 25 sermons, future research should take larger samples to generalize the findings of this study. The study recommends incorporating prosodic aspects in teaching religious discourse to make sermons more impactful.