Blessing Expressions in Rayya Tigrinya: Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects

Abstract

The Rayya speech community, a speaker of the North Ethio-Semitic Tigrinya language and inhabiting the Southern Tigray Zone in Ethiopia, has a long tradition of blessings ingrained in their social fabric. A blessing, which is an inclusive, efficacious, and power-oriented speech act, deals with benedictions and compliments and is used to demonstrate the good disposition of the addressor to the addressee/s. In light of this, this study attempted to provide a descriptive account of the semantics and pragmatics of blessing expressions in Rayya Tigrinya, a variety of Tigrinya. Accordingly, blessing expressions’ denotative and connotative meanings used in general and particular contexts were presented and discussed. To this end, a total of twenty-four key partakers, ten males and fourteen females, aged 45-85, were purposefully selected. The obtained natural data via semi-structured interviews and participant observation were checked out and validated through introspection. The collected data were then described and analyzed through a linguistic descriptive method. The results revealed that blessing expressions are predominantly metaphorical, devoid of their literal meanings. Security, peace, love, health, wealth, success, happiness, lineage, and unity, all of which are basic, are the most general and recurrent subjects expounded in the blessing expressions used in both contexts. Throughout the given instances, blessing expressions are made either implicitly or explicitly appealing to the supernatural for the good wishes to be effective, which also makes them religious.