A Pragmatic Study of the “Supplication of Complainers” by Imam Ali Al-Sajjad

The present study is an attempt to analyse Imam Ali Al-Sajjad’s “Supplication of Complainers” pragmatically. This concept is selected to be studied due to its importance in daily life and there are few researches about it, as far as the researcher knows. The present study mainly aims to answer the following question: What are the types of main speech acts, speech act strategies and auxiliary speech acts and their frequency in the Supplication of Complainers. It is hypothesized that: the most commonly main speech act is representative. Representative speech act strategy of complaining is mostly used Explanation is the most dominant auxiliary speech act. Quantitative analysis is used (using frequencies and percentages) as well as qualitative (using Searle’s 1969 classification of speech acts and van Dijk’s 1977 classification of auxiliary speech acts) analysis of the data. After analysing the data, it has been concluded that the above hypotheses are verified.