Telling Martyrdom: The Linguistic Encoding of Agency, Attitude and Activity in Narratives of Martyrs’ Women (2014-2017).

The present paper aims at examining selected narratives of the mothers and wives of
soldiers martyred during the struggle between Egypt and terrorists. The period
following the 25th of January and 30th of June 2011 and 2013 respectively has
witnessed the bloodiest surge of terrorist attacks on Egypt as a whole and on military
and police officers in Sinai in particular, resulting in an average of 2000 martyrs of
different ranks. As a tribute to these martyrs, their mothers and/or their wives were
invited to official ceremonies to talk about their lost ones. The present paper attempts
to investigate how far the language of the selected narratives encodes the narrators’
evaluation of the martyrdom event and how it reflects their emotional immersion in
the narrative. Labov (1972) defines narrative as “as one method of recapitulating
past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events
which actually occurred”. By applying Halliday’s transitivity framework (2004), the
selected narratives are analysed to investigate the major participant roles as in index
of agency. Using Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal theory, the present research
also evaluates the attitudes of both the narrators and the martyrs towards martyrdom.
Finally, the emotional expressivity realized via the narrative structure referential
activity (RA) is studied to validate the emotional impact of the narratives. The
primary analysis has shown that the main agents in all narratives is the martyr
himself; no agency trace of the terrorists is observed. Pride and positive judgement
are also the prevalent attitudes in all of the highly-weighted narratives.