Discourse Analysisofthe10th Letter ofNahj Al-Balagheh Based on John Searle's Speech Act Theory

With the aim of understanding the hidden layers and knowing the desired effects of this letter, the present article has adopted a discourse analysis approach to analyze the letters based on Searle’s (2015) category of speech act and its structural features. For this purpose, first, the text of the letter was divided into utterances, and then their respective speech acts were identified. The findings showed that out of a total of 22 actions, representative acts with 8, directive acts with 7 and expressive acts with 6 occurrences were the most frequently used speech acts in this letter. Moreover, the declarative act had only one occurrence, and the communicative speech act was absent in the corpus. The frequency of directive and representative speech acts in this letter indicates that Imam (A.S., peace be upon Him) has tried to prevent Muawiya from war through ‘warning’, ‘ordering’, and ‘advising’. In this letter, each action was expressed with a specific style and structure, and the type of words and the structure of the sentences were used in harmony with the action.
Keywords: Nahj al-Balaghah, letter 10, speech action, cognitive text, Searle