A Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree"Licence en langue et littérature anglaises"

RÉSUME,

This work entiled " A progmatie Interpretaction of some Biblied verses Related to Forgiveness and Reconcilliation in Church Sermons" aims at interpreting pragmatically the selected biblical verses related to forgiveness and reconcilliation in church sermons. The interpretation is based on the speech Act Theory to search for the intention of the preacher which mlay be different from the literal meaning of the read verses. This work sought to know if the bibliecal versesq have both semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning. In collecting the data, the researcher attended some selected protestant churches. He gathered different sermons which contain verses related to his work from different protestant preachers. The data were collected from thirty Burundian informanys who are all protestant preachers. The researcher had to translate verses and sermons from Kirundi into English. Finally, he makes a pragmatic interpretation of the result. As findings, biblical verses have a sematic meaning and pragmatic meaning. The sematic meaning corresponds to the question: " What does X verse mean?" whereas the pragmatic meaning corresponds to the question: " What did preacher mean by X verse?" All along this work the research deals on the latter question. The message may be an advice, a promise, an apology, a warn, information, etc. The sermons were not well delivered due to the lack of order in preaching. Moreaver, the data have been analysed and the result analysed by means of the speech act Theory to identify locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. This work is made of five chapters: the introduction, the literature review which deals with existing theories about semantics and pragmaties, the methodology of thestudy, the data presentation. analysis and findings and finally the general conclusion and recommendations which are suggested to preachers, to future researchers and to the Government.