Exploring Religious Discourse Authority among Nobel Peace Prize Laureates: A Pragmatic Approach

Abstract

Authority is the influence of a rhetorical nature that the discourse possesses from the authority of the addressee's position and the nature of the relationships that arise between him or her and the addressees. This paper aims to explore the role of the authority of the religious discourse among Nobel Peace Prize laureates from a pragmatic perspective. The methodology involves using the pragmatic approach relating to linguistic argumentation as it was revealed to Chaim Perelman. The methodology is also a qualitative methodology concerned with understanding the phenomenon within its context and uses inference and exploration, benefiting from a set of inputs related to the phenomenon without resorting to precise statistics to infer the phenomenon. The study sample includes speeches collected in the book Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Speeches. The findings demonstrate that various Nobel Peace Prize laureates have resorted to the authority of religious discourse to support their speeches with pieces of evidence gleaned from the religious discourses. The results also show that the most common authority of the holy discourse in the various religions in the speeches of Nobel laureates was the authority of the holy books, i.e. the Torah, the Bible, and the Holy Qur’an. That said, this study recommends studying the speeches of Nobel Peace Prize winners from the perspective of cultural sustainability.