MELODY OF AN ORAL RELIGIOUS SERMON

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the melodic organization of the texts of Anglican and Lutheran sermons, which are an integral part of services in the respective churches. Examining the compositional features of the texts of the researched sermons made it possible to identify four compositional parts that are necessarily present in both types of sermons (topic manifestation, citation, interpretation, conclusion), each of which is characterized by relative semantic and structural independence and pursues a specific pragmatic task. The research material, consisting of oral English and German sermons, was subjected to perceptual, auditory and instrumental analysis. A complex auditory and instrumental analysis of the melodic characteristics of preachers’ speech allows us to conclude that there is unity not only in the pragmatic tasks of preachers in the two most common Protestant trends, but also in the prosodic features of the texts of oral sermons. Integral melodic parameters include the use of emphatic phrasal stress on informative and/or emotionally significant parts of phrases in supraphrasal units, the distribution of maximums of the fundamental frequency over the compositional parts of the text, the width of the frequency range of phrases, which is achieved not only at the expense of high indicators of maxima fundamental frequency in sermon phrases, but also due to lowering the lower limit of fundamental frequency values. Distinctive features include the use of different pitch levels in peculiar parts of the text: in the initial part of the Anglican sermon, there is a predominance of low pitch level, while in the Lutheran sermon, the low voice level is the most used in the final part of the sermon. On the basis of the identified integral prosodic means involved in the organisation of the analysed texts, it is possible to state that Anglican and Lutheran sermons belong to the same type of preaching discourse.