Pragmatics of the hadiths concerning the women in Kitāb Man lā-Yaḥḍuruh al-Faqīh based on Michael Halliday's model

Pragmatics deals with the study of the purpose of those utterances exchanged between a messenger and those who receive his/her messages. Based on this knowledge the same utterance can convey different functions in different contents. Michael Halliday (1975) who is a pragmatics theorist has introduced the semantic and purpose-oriented functions of language in seven types and believes that these seven linguistic functions can be traced in all applied types of language. The hadiths quoted from the Prophet (ṣ.‘a.w) and the Infallible Imams (‘a.s.) contain numerous utterances about women, linguistic functions of which regardless of the context will harm the social prestige of women. It is attempted in this study to investigate from this perspective a collection of these hadiths extracted from Kitāb Man lā-Yaḥḍuruh al-Faqīh. The results of this investigation indicate that out of 960 utterances about women quoted in this book the functions that enjoy the highest frequency include the ‘representational’ (41%) and ‘heuristic’ (33%) functions. This statistics indicates that to convey a particular message pertaining to women (representational function) or the  inquiries about legal and canonical issues pertaining to women (heuristic function) not only would not cause the decline of women's social status but also would cause, in many of the messages, emphasis on their functions as performers in a linguistic community.