Secondary religious discourse: Sermon as a distributional macro field

Vol.1,No.2(2008)

Abstract
For more than two decades, research into the theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) has dealt with the text material of religious discourse (Firbas, Svoboda, Adam). In contrast with the existing writings that discuss primarily biblical texts, the present paper explores sermons as a secondary religious discourse. After a brief introduction into the sociolinguistic and stylistic aspects of the realm of sermons, the paper looks at scripted homilies in terms of distributional macrofi elds (highest level of FSP analysis) and traces typical dynamic-semantic features of the text, including a theme – transition – rheme structure at the textual level.
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