Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Το νεοελληνικό κήρυγμα ως κειμενικό είδος και ως διαδικασία

by Stamatis Stamatopoulos

The sermon, one of the most important practices of the Church from the time of Christ until today, has not received systematic attention from modern Linguistics. Likewise, little has been studied about the liturgical language and its relationship with it. The timelessness of the philological interest in the texts has left a gap, as: a) sermons have not been systematically researched in the modern era (e.g. since 1990 onwards), b) every attempt concerns exclusively written sermons, without interest for the oral environment of which they are a part and c) the theoretical framework on the basis of which the texts belonging to this genre can be analyzed has not been established. The purpose of this work is the description and presentation of the modern Greek sermon as an independent textual genre of modern Greek. At the same time, an attempt is made to investigate its function within the liturgical practice of the Orthodox Church, to which it belongs and with which it interacts, as well as its definition as a process with specific lingual and contextual characteristics. In addition, this work aims to highlight the connection of the contextual characteristics of the modern Greek sermon with linguistic elements that characterize it as a special genre in modern Greek. It is beyond the aims of this thesis to investigate the schematic structure or organization of the sermon, the analysis of other elements of interaction, the detailed investigation of the linguistic choices associated with the Sermon and its comparison with other textual genres of ecclesiastical or non-ecclesiastical speech. In Chapter 2, the linguistic expression of the sermon is contrasted with the sacred languages, as well as with the two other types that are appeared in the Greek religious language based on linguistic characteristics, i.e. the liturgical church language and the church language of administration. In Chapter 3 describes the position and role of the sermon in the process of Orthodox worship with an emphasis on its orality and the linguistic characteristics that distinguish the sermon from its other parts. The chapter also contains an interesting comparison of the presence of scholarly elements (not only at the lexical level, but also in terms of the come back of grammatical structures) in the sermon and in the modern standard language in the context of the phenomenon of diglossia. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the development of the concepts of the genre, the functional variety (register) and the context (context), linguistic and situational, always in relation to the sermon and its special characteristics. The principles and process of creating the original (and the first for the Greek language) Body of Ecclesiastical Texts (SKEL) are also described. The next two chapters present in detail the parameters of Hymes' "SPEAKING" model (Setting/Scene, Participants, Ends, Act Sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms and Genre), which are systematically applied to the SKEL data with the aim of identifying characteristics of the subject under…