2.1 Review of relevant literature .1 The concept of discourse
2.1.2 The language of religion
Religion is a form of meaning construction activity which depends heavily on language to express, inculcate and apply (Bouma, 1992; cited in Bouma and Clyne, 1995).
This point is also emphasised by Crystal (online, p.11) when he says that ―language plays a
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fundamental role in the practical understanding, expression, presentation and furtherance of any set of religious beliefs.‖ The language of Christian religion is sometimes described as archaic and far removed from current usage. Onuigbo (1996), for example, describes it as being characterised by predominant use of archaic forms such as resisteth for resists, beareth for bears, doeth for does, wilt and shalt for will and shall, ye and thou for you, etc.
He explains that such archaic forms are used not just to provoke a strong feeling of reverence for the Almighty God, but more importantly to remind the followers of the unchanging nature of God. God is believed to be the same yesterday, today and forever.
Disregard for formal syntactic and punctuation rules, the use of initial capital letters in words that represent the supreme deity and in the pronouns referring to him, even in the middle of the sentence in order to show the supreme authority of God, and lack of strict compliance with concord rules are identified as syntactic features of religious language.
Onuigbo attributes this freedom in the observation of syntactic rules to the measure of freedom enjoyed by the followers of Christian religion in their mode, place and time of their worship.
Onuigbo‘s view of religious language is rather too general. Most of the features he identified are true of some varieties but not true of others. While the use of initial capital letters in words that represent the supreme deity may cut across all varieties of religious language, lack of strict compliance with syntactic rules may not, and this may exist in the older forms of religious language such as the liturgical language.
The language of Christian religion, no doubt, exhibits some common features such as the presence of vocabulary items drawn from the Bible (such as God, Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, heaven, hell, sin, repentance, salvation, etc.) as well as theuseofbiblical quotations (either direct or indirect). Ebeling (1973) rightly points out that throughout its history, Christianity has always regarded itself as dependent upon the Bible as the source and norm of the language of faith, and as such, it is directly and indirectly nourished by the vocabulary of the Bible. The Bible, as the holy book of Christianity is regarded as the authoritative word of God and almost every Christian religious text makes reference to it.
The reverence with which Christians hold the holy Bible is captured in the following words from a 2002 edition of the Jehovah‘s Witness magazine entitled ‗the Road to Eternal Life:
Have you found it?‘ (cited in Babalola, 2007:144):
The Bible is a precious gift from God. It explains things that we could otherwise never know. It tells about those who live in the spirit realm. It reveals
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God‘s thoughts, His personality, and His purpose. It tells of His dealings with people over thousands of years. It talks of things that will happen in the future.
Religious language is a variety of language that consists of other varieties within it.
This view is buttressed by Crystal (1965, cited in Olaniyan and Oyekola 2007), Brook (1981), Crystal and Davy (1983), and Ogunleye and Olagunju (2007). These sub varieties include the language of liturgy, sermons, theology, scriptures, prayers, songs, etc. The common features of the language of religion, not withstanding, each variety has some linguistic features that characterise it and make it quite strikingly different from other varieties. According to Crystal and Davy (1983), the features are concentrated in the vocabulary and in certain parts of the grammar. Therefore, uniform description of religious language as conservative does not reflect the actual use in the various religious varieties or genres. Most religious genres follow the general development of the language. Only a few linguistic features are clearly diagnostic of religious language, and a few genres have preserved these features extensively in the religious domain.
Consequent upon the diversity of religious language, Holt (2006) argues for a variationist approach to its study. He stresses the need to investigate religious language from the point of view of its particularities, as well as its generalities, rather than dwelling solely on the generalities. In other words, he submits that a more productive approach to the study of the language of religion is that of investigating the actual instances and varieties of religious language in terms of their actual linguistic characteristics, and broadly modelling language as a kind of constellation of discourse held in balance by two opposing forces: a centrifugal attraction for uniformity and generality, and a peripheral pull for individuation and particularity.
Holt (2006) outlines some major background variables that would clearly affect religious language, with a view to underlining the problematic nature of approaches which view it in simple propositional terms. These variables include: religion itself, level, genre, time, context, mode, and language itself. According to him, the language of religion is bound to display variations reflecting the distinction between ‗God language‘ and ‗religious language‘ (religion), between the authentic language of faith itself and the intellectualised language about such faith language (level), stylistic patterning and purposes of religious language within that broad division of level (genre), the distinction between synchronic and diachronic (time), between heteroglossia and intertextuality (context), between oral, written, or pictorial medium (mode), and the influence of multilingualism (language). The variables
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are inexhaustible. There are others such as denomination, spiritual orientation, etc. The need for a variationist approach to the study of religious language is supported by Crystal‘s (online, pp.11-12) view that ―language must be studied in its correct social perspective, as the most flexible and potentially subtle kind of human communicative behaviour.‖ This sociolinguistic view has informed our study of the language of Catholic Bishops‘ pastoral letters in Onitsha Ecclesiastical province of Nigeria from a discourse-stylistic perspective.
Studies on the language of Christian religion have concentrated mainly on sermons, liturgy, prayers, songs, etc. They include: Crystal and Davy (1983),Adedeji (2007),Pernot (2006), Mar (1998), Keane (1997), Odebunmi (2010), Bouma and Clyne (1995), Taiwo (2005, 2006, 2008), Babajide (2007), Lanteigne (2008), Babatunde (1998), Adeyanju (2008), and Idowu (2007).
Crystal and Davy (1983), following their analysis of the liturgical language of contemporary Christianity, describes liturgical language as being marked by its use of archaism and its ability to go to extreme, and so is very often ‗so removed from the language of everyday conversation as to be almost unintelligible, save to an initiated minority.‘ They attribute this to three main influences: the linguistic originals, a strong concern over speakability, and the need to balance between intelligibility, pronounceability, relative dignity, and formality, a balance between the ordinary and the obscure. This, however, is no longer the case today as there have been changes in recent times in liturgical language. In the Roman Catholic Church, for example, Latin has been replaced by English, Masses are celebrated in the everyday language of the people,and contemporary choruses are sungduring liturgical celebrations.
Adedeji (2007) is a study of the praise and worship style of the contemporary Nigerian avant garde (charismatic) Christian church, whose mode of worship was found to differ greatly from that of mainline churches. He observes that the musical style possesses little musical value, even though it occupies a significant and indispensable position in contemporary liturgy of Nigerian Christianity, and suggests that the leaders have basic musical training to enhance quality performance. While Adedeji‘s observation is true, it should be noted that the essence of such praise and worship songs is not to demonstrate the worshippers‘ artistry in music but to offer praises to God. The songs should be seen as language performance rather than musical performance.
Pernot (2006) examines two rhetorical forms of religious discourse, prayer and hymn, basing his study on Greco-Roman antiquity, both pagan and Christian. He concludes that each of prayer and hymn has a rhetoric specific to it which is characterised by
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structures, arguments, stylistic forms, and an actio of its own, and as such can be analysed as a specific form of discourse. Pernot uses this study to buttress his point that religious messages can be analysed in rhetorical terms and that rhetoric itself sometimes shows a religious dimension.This is a bold step in the study of discourse for, even though religion is intrinsically rhetorical, application of a rhetorical approach to religious messagesis considered by many to be tantamount to adopting a rationalist attitudeand misunderstanding the very basis of religion which is belief in the transcendental.A rhetorical analysis of Roman Catholic bishops‘ pastoral letters in the Onitsha province of Nigeria will further demonstrate this point of interconnection between religion and rhetoric.
Mar (1998) demonstrates how language use reveals, expresses and constructs the unique coding orientations of a social group. She demonstrates this by focusing on a variety of prayers, and how the prayers from various Christian groups reveal the differences in the way the adherents relate to God. The study appears not to take cognisance of the current wave of Pentecostalism which has now penetrated even the Mainline churches, leading to more emphasis on inspirational prayers and less emphasis on set ones. In the current dispensation, one wonders whether Christian groups canstill be identified by their mode of prayers.
Keane (1997) is similar to Mar (1998) in its focus on prayer by a religious group.
Asa theological study of religious language,the work focuses on the interaction of religious adherents with spiritual and invisible participants in such speech situations as prayers, and other ritualistic practices. It concludes by showing that the adherents of each specific religious group determine the linguistic and pragmatic properties in religions.
Like Keane (1997), Odebunmi (2010)is also a theological study.Itinvestigates the gender linguistic and discoursal resourcesdeployed by Nigerian theological seminary students to orient to gender beliefs. His observation from the study which was based on a sample of two mainline religious institutions--the Nigerian Baptist Theological Seminary, Ogbomoso and the Dominican Institute, Ibadan—was that English usage in the theo-religious context in Nigeria largely complies with the principles of dominance.Gendered language usedby seminary students was found to largely reflect the traditional, social and religious roles of men and women in the larger Southwestern Nigerian society.This study is a useful contribution to discourse studies as it has shown that linguistic analysis can tell a lot about a text‘s positioning on an issue such as gender.
Bouma and Clyne (1995) investigate the content and structure of the language used by three groups of Australian Anglicans. The study reveals distinctive linguistic patterns
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common to each group. Four dimensions of linguistic variation were discovered in the analysis of individual responses to questions of meaning: ―religious‖ versus ―secular,‖
―formulaic‖ versus ―individualistic,‖ ―direct‖ versus ―agentless passive,‖ and ―confident‖
versus ―hedging‖ responses. In Bouma and Clyne‘s observation, differences in spiritual orientation were found to be associated with differences in these linguistic patterns while age and gender were not. Each spiritual orientation was associated with a different linguistic type of response. This research points the way to the use of linguistic analysis of religious discourse as a technique for identifying and analysing the different ways groups are religious and for examining the ways in which religious change is occurring. Verbal responses to questions of religion may determine an individual‘s spirituality or religiosity at the theoretical level but not at the level of practice. It is a known fact that there is a wide gap between religion and practice. Our study examines the persuasive devices adopted by the Catholic bishops in their pastoral letters in an attempt to bridge the gap between religion and practice in the Onitsha Province.
Taiwo (2005; 2006; and 2008) are studies on the language of religion from the approach of discourse analysis. Taiwo (2005) studies interrogation in Charismatic Christian pulpit discourse. He specifically examines the peculiar use of interrogatives--such as polar interrogatives, wh-interrogatives and rhetorical questions--by charismatic Christian preachers, and concludes that interrogation is not only used by the preachers as a tool for getting information but also to regulate the linguistic behaviour of the congregation in the process of the discourse. Here, emphasis is on the use of interrogatives in oral discourse. In written discourse, however, interrogatives occur as rhetorical questions performing different discourse functions, other than the ones identified in this study.
Similarly, Taiwo (2006) investigates the general pattern of discourse in English-medium Christian pulpit discourse (ECPD). Using as data pulpit messages given by some Christian preachers in denominational and interdenominational services in South-western Nigeria, he focuses on the various ways pulpit preachers in ECPD elicit responses from their congregation. The study reveals three major methods of response elicitation: the use of interrogatives, declaratives, and imperatives. The responses elicited are in form of speech, mental behaviour, and physical action. More spoken responses than mental behaviour and physical action are elicited, and they are in five different forms: conventional answer, response to prayer, repeated statement, gap filling, and corrected statement. Taiwo concludes that despite the fact that the way responses are elicited depends largely on beliefs and practices of any given religious community, the patterns of elicitation identified in this
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study are common to ECPD preachers. The conclusion appears to be over generalised, as the patterns of response elicitation identified here are common to ECPD preachers in Pentecostal churches. They are rarely found among preachers in the Mainline Churches, such as the Roman Catholic Church.
Taiwo (2008) examines the language of some contemporary Christian songs in Pentecostal Churches in South-western Nigeria in order to determine the choices made in the lyrics and identify how they tie with the wider social and cultural structures of the society. The study was based on the premise that vocal music is a form of language performance, and that songs are not just sung for the purpose of singing, but have meanings which are rooted in the experience and cultural values of the singer. It reveals that Christian songs in contemporary times do not necessarily convey the intrinsic values of praise worship, as they used to do in the early days of Christianity in Nigeria, but are influenced by the prosperity message coupled with socio-cultural practices. Taiwo‘s study is an emphasis on the influence of context on language use:the influence of the contemporary socio-cultural context of Nigeria on Christian songs in the Pentecostal churches. His observation is not peculiar to Pentecostal Churches. Such songs cut across otherchurches.
Babajide‘s (2007) is stylistic study of Song of Solomon and p‘Bitek‘s Song of Lawino. Babajideanalyses the two songs at the graphological, lexical, phonological, syntactic, rhetorical and semantic level, with the conclusion that both songs have in common a lot of stylistic peculiarities, and that the areas of differences between them are attributable to the differences in their authors‘ dispositions to the subject matter of love. His discussion of rhetorical devices among other stylistic devices in the songs is a useful insight to the present study.
Lanteigne (2008) examines stylistic variation within the religious register. He investigates how different Christian Churches vary in the degree of formality used by priests/ministers in their sermons, as evidenced by left-, center-, and right-branching sentence structure. The data used are transcripts of seven Sunday morning sermons given by Caucasian male priests/ministers in Catholic, Episcopal, United Methodist, Wesleyan Methodist, and Assembly of God Churches in Pennsylvania and Missouri and on a national broadcast. These were analysed in terms of sentence branching structure, and the analysis showed that the more formal the Church setting, the more formal the sentence branching structure. The study gives an insight into language use according to situation. It indicates that different registers are used for different social settings, and that even within registers, there are variations.
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Babatunde (1998) does a semantic analysis of evangelical Christian religious speeches, using speech act theory of meaning. His main argument is that behind every Christian religious communication is the speaker‘s intention to persuade the audience, to modify their attitudes and beliefs towards an intended direction. This is another study that tries to establish the fact that religious messages are intrinsically rhetorical. The insights derived from it will enhance our discussion of the persuasive functions of rhetorical devices in Roman Catholic bishops‘ pastoral letters in Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province. However, a rhetorical approach would be more suitable to the study than the speech-act theory.
Adeyanju (2008) is a stylo-semantic analysis of the content of the greeting cards sent to members of the Redeemed Christian Church of God by Pastor Adeboye. The study, which is based on Halliday‘s theory of meteafunctions and Adegbija‘s layers of meaning, reveals the cleric‘s use of rhetorical devices such as personification, parallelism, symbolism, idiom, antithesis, alliteration and assonance in addition to graphological and lexico-semantic devices. The study is found insightful and relevant to ours in its discussion of the rhetorical devices deployed by the cleric. However, it is more literary than linguistic.The literary and the linguistic aspects of the rhetorical devices should have been balanced.
While several linguistic studies exist on different forms of religious discourse, much attention has not been devoted to the study of the language of Catholic bishops‘ pastoral letters. Related studies are those on the language of the Pastoral Epistles of St. Paul. These include Harrison (1921) and Van Neste (2005). Harrison (1921)shows how the language of the Epistles can be used as a key to unlock the old secret of their origin. He uses a mass of linguistic statistics to support his double contention that the Pastorals cannot be attributed to Paul and that they belong to the current speech of the second century. His focus is not on the language of the Epistles per se. He only uses the linguistic evidence to support his view on the question of authorship of the Epistles. Van Neste‘s (2005) interest is on the language and style of the Epistles. He examines them to determine the boundaries of each discourse unit using cohesive shift analysis. He analyses the cohesion of each unit noting common devices from the ancient epistolary genre, rhetorical devices, lexical and semantic repetition and symmetrical patterns. He focuses on the connections between the units in the letters-- connection between contiguous units, semantic chains, and the grouping of units into larger section, thus highlighting the variety of connections across and throughout the letter. Van Neste‘s study is very much insightful because of its linguistic approach, especially the aspect on rhetorical devices.
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Segers (1985) is also related to our study in its concern with pastoral letters in the Roman Catholic Church. However, Segers examines the American Roman Catholic bishops‘ pastoral letter on War and Peace from a feminist perspective rather than from a linguistic perspective. She looks at the letter from the point of view of a consideration of the role of women in the consultative process that produced the letter, and analyses the content of the letter to assess its impact, where appropriate, on questions of justice and equality of the sexes. She concludes that women‘s involvement in the letter is minimal. The present study which is a rhetorical analysis of selected Roman Catholic bishops‘ pastoral letters in Onitsha Ecclesiastical Province of Nigeria is a shift of focus from other forms of religious discourse to pastoral letter which has not received adequate consideration from scholars on the language and style of Christian religion, with the result that the persuasive properties of the letters have not been explored.