Peculiarities of English religious discourse for the formation of reading competence for future theologians

Abstract

Interest in the functioning of language has begun to emerge at levels not previously considered for certain social and historical reasons more recently. Religion as a social phenomenon differs from other areas of communication because it covers the totality of types of human behavior directed towards the area of the sacred and secret. In today’s realities, the theologian solves new professional problems that have not recently been among his competence, interprets socio-cultural phenomena, extends the system of guiding lines of professional activity. For successful realization of the requirements of society to modern theologians in their professional activity, knowledge of a foreign language must be a necessary component. Reading in a foreign language is a communicative skill and means of communication of the theologian. The concept of «discourse» is defined and four groups of discourse peculiarities are distinguished. Approaches to defining the concept of «religious discourse» are outlined. The model of institutional discourse and its components are described. The characteristics of religious discourse are outlined. Faith is identified as a key concept of religious discourse. The forms of realization of religious discourse (communication in the church, communication in small groups and direct intimate communication with God), its strategies (receiving support, purification of the soul, the call to convert to the faith, strengthening of faith, awareness of belonging to the confession) are distinguished. The system of linguistic means is described, which includes such lexical units as neutral, general book and churchreligious vocabulary, as well as vocabulary with newspaper-publicistic functional-style coloring. The lexical means of religious discourse include emotionally-evaluative and archaic-exalted vocabularies. It is established that among the grammatical features of religious discourse there are the literary nature of speech, the archaic stylistic coloring of language and the creation of expressive effect.