REPRESENTATION OF THE CATEGORY OF SACREDNESS IN THE THEOLOGICAL TEXT (based on the English Bible text)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17308/lic/1680-5755/2026/2/102-111Keywords:
sacredness, theological text, text formation, contextual argumentation, intertextuality, gnoseological heterogeneity of textAbstract
The article accentuates relevant issues of text formation through the prism of text categorial properties. The purpose of the study is to substantiate sacredness as the text categorial dominant of theological texts. It is effected by means of: 1) considering sacredness as a universal category of religious consciousness; 2) interpreting sacred knowledge as a categorial content of sacredness. The methods employed in the study include the theories of dominant, intertextuality, categorial text modeling and contextual, propositional, emotive and definitional analyses. The language material of the present study is taken from «The American Journal of Biblical Theology». In the framework of intertextuality the theological text is viewed as an intertext and a form of positive religious conceptualization. The author proves that sacredness determines the theological text semantics and structure. Consequently, the analyzed category is interpreted as a factor of theological text formation. It is shown that the theological text semantics is constituted by the three segments of sacredness (onomatology, imperativeness, eschatology), their linguistic representatives being systemically organized. The positive conceptualization of sacredness leads to religious knowledge formation that renders the analyzed text gnoseologically heterogeneous (sacred knowledge vs. religious knowledge). The structure of theological texts is stipulated by their functional orientation – interpretation of sacred knowledge validity through contextual argumentation. Accordingly, various types of hypotaxis (conditional, temporal, adversative, concessive, causative-consecutive etc.) represent logical reasoning, linguistic means of subjective modality (emotive and evaluative semantics, modal verbs and expressions) explicating a writer’s position. The obtained outcomes allow to differentiate sacred and religious texts on the linguistic grounds and underscore their text typological statuses.
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