A Psycho-Pragmatic Study of Superstition in Literary Texts

Abstract

The present study investigates the concept of superstition in some literary texts from a psycho-pragmatic view. It aims to present the conceptualization of the superstition in literary texts by employing psycho-pragmatic tools as implicatures, specch acts, items of relevance theory, perceptual organizations and types of deictic expressions. It comes up with two types of superstition which are causal and coincidental in which pledges, condemnation, request, states, description speech act have been used; scopal, epistemic, existential, partitive, and privatalization are utilized as relevance items to avoid ambiguity in the representation of superstition; and perceptual organization as similarity, focus, elaboration are played psychological role to reflects inner feeling and belief of the character in the chosen texts.