COVID‑19 and a Greek Catholic Hierarch’s Experience of Virtual Communication with Parishioners

Abstract

In this article, the author carries out a communicative and pragmatic analysis of texts and a stylistic analysis of the keywords of religious discourse. The object of the research is the discourse of the Greek Catholic Church in Slovakia. The subject of the research is the keywords and main topics in the corpus of Archbishop Milan Chautur’s publications on social networks. The research methodology is based on the principles of discourse analysis, computational linguistics, linguistics 2.0, and quantitative linguistics. To realise the purpose of the research, the author uses the linguistic tool Sketch Engine, a fourth-generation concordancer, which provides quick search and statistical processing of data. For the corpus, the author refers to material from Chautur’s Internet messages in the profile named “Vladyka Milan odpovedá” (Vladyka Chautur responds) over one year of the pandemic, i. e., between 2020 and 2021. Using the Simple Maths method, the author extracts keywords based on two corpora – the main one (created by the user) and the background one (built into the system). Vladyka’s web-communication fits the modern trend of active communication through social networks, where it is not only used by representatives of the secular world, but also by the clergy. Considering the fact that the background corpus of Slovak Web 2011 (skTenTen11) is a language model, the author singles out the following keywords: isus (Jesus), Christ (Christ), pandémia (pandemic), kovid (Covid), bohorodička (Virgin Mary), cerkov (Church), vakcinácium (vaccinacium), and eparchia (diocese). These words have the highest coefficient of semantic similarity (Score) of words from the studied and background corpora. Using the linguistic criterion for isolating keywords, it is possible to single out the cognitive components of the archbishop’s discursive field, such as discursive dominants: human life, the Church on earth and in heaven, family.