Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-2h6rp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-18T08:41:37.389Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anderson, Lloyd B. (1986). Evidentials, paths of change, and mental maps: Typologically regular asymmetries. In Chafe, & Nichols, (eds.), 273–312.Google Scholar
Bauman, Richard (1977). Verbal art as performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.Google Scholar
Bloch, Maurice (1975). ed. Political language and oratory in traditional society. London: Academic.Google Scholar
Bord, Richard J., & Faulkner, Joseph E. (1983). The Catholic Charismatics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace (1986). Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing. In Chafe, & Nichols, (eds.), 261–72.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace & Nichols, Johanna (1986), eds. Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Davis, Gerald L. (1985). I got the word in me and I can sing it, you know. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John (1986). Self-evidence and ritual speech. In Chafe, & Nichols, (eds.), 313–36.Google Scholar
Erickson, Frederick (1981). Money tree, lasagna bush, salt and pepper: Social construction of topical cohesion in a conversation among Italian Americans. In Tannen, (ed.), 43–70.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Charles A. (1985). The study of religious discourse. In Tannen, Deborah & Alatis, James E. (eds.), Language and linguistics: The interdependence of theory, data, and application (GURT 1985), 205–13. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Flynn, Thomas (1974). The Charismatic Renewal and the Irish experience. London: Hodder & Stoughton.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Gutwinski, Waldemar (1976). Cohesion in literary texts. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K., & Hasan, Ruqaiya (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Inglis, Tom (1987). Moral monopoly: The Catholic Church in modern Irish society. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.Google Scholar
McGuire, Meredith (1982). Pentecostal Catholics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Rappaport, Roy A. (1979). The obvious aspects of ritual. In Ecology, meaning, and religion, 173–221. Richmond, CA: North Atlantic.Google Scholar
Samarin, William J. (1973). Protestant preachers in the prophetic line. International Yearbook for the Sociology of Religion 8: 243–57.Google Scholar
Samarin, William ed. (1976). Language in religious practice. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1981). Discourse as an interactional achievement: Some uses of “uh huh” and other things that come between sentences. In Tannen, (ed.), 71–93.Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael (1983). Discourse analysis: The sociolinguistic analysis of natural language. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Szuchewycz, Bohdan (1989). “The growth is in the silence”: The meanings of silence in the Irish Catholic Charismatic Movement. In Curtin, Chris & Wilson, Tom (eds.), Ireland from below: Social change and local communities, 46–69. Galway (Ireland): University College Galway Press.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah ed. (1981), ed. Analyzing discourse: Text and talk (GURT 1981). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah (1984). Conversational style. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah (1989). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar