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Evidentiality in ritual discourse: The social construction of religious meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2009

Bohdan Szuchewycz
Bohdan Szuchewycz
Affiliation:
Communications Studies, Brock UniversitySt. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3Al, Canada
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Abstract

The communal creation of religious meaning is here examined in the context of an Irish Catholic Charismatic prayer meeting. Through a micro-analysis of the “spontaneous” ritual language of one such meeting, various discursive strategies are revealed which function to create for the participants an experience of divine/human communication. These include an explicit effort on the part of speakers to construct a thematically consistent and coherent ritual event out of a sequence of apparently spontaneous individual speech acts, as well as a marked use of evidentials to attribute spiritual authorship and authority to personal speech acts. In contrast to what has been suggested as the self-evident nature of ritual speech, the frequent use of evidentials is related to the relatively recent emergence of the movement, its ideology, and its emphasis on the personal narrative as the central form of religious discourse. (Ritual language, evidentials, Catholic religion, charismatic religion, religious movements, authority in discourse)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , June 1994 , pp. 389 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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