Brief Synopsis of Research
The dissertation attempts at reconstructing the systemic relations of the Old Testament (OT) religious discourse (RD) in the Book of Psalms (using the King James Version and the Russian Synodal translations of the Bible, with occasional insights into the Hebrew original). The systemic network was studied by analyzing the key concepts and the most frequently occurring linguostylistic means of their verbalization. The research methodology is based on the theoretical framework introduced by Vladimir Karasik (the Volgograd sociolinguistic school), with multidisciplinary methods drawing on sociolinguistic, social, historical, cognitive, cultural, and religious studies. The results were obtained through qualitative research involving discourse, genre, cognitive, content, stylistic and poetic analyses.
The transcendental nature of religious nature entailing the high abstractedness of its key concepts is one of the major challenges of studying RD. Translation variables were intentionally omitted from the research focus, since the ‘text/semiotic invariant’ of the Book of Psalms was prioritized.
The genre classification of Psalms revealed their emotional (lamentations, complaints, praises, gratitude), didactic (retrospective, instructional) and hybrid types.
The research findings proved strict semiotic arrangement and distinct correlation of regularly-occurring cognitive and verbal devices in the studied RD. The key concepts, norms and values, the system-forming strategy, the chronotope (spatiotemporal features termed by Mikhail Bakhtin) as well as their interrelations create the intricate systemic framework of the religious worldview in the Book of Psalms.
In addition to institutionality typical of any RD, the studied OT variety is distinctive in its high theocentricity, text-centeredness, and explicitly recurring ethnocultural and religious identification markers. The conceptual structure of the OT discourse abounds in intertextual and interdiscursive components (existential, spiritual, and esthetic discourses).
Regularly occurring multi-level rhetorical devices verbalize the key concepts and their interrelations. Repetition in all its varieties (of which syntactic parallelism is the most common) tends to be the key structural and stylistic feature performing mnemonic, ritual, suggestive, didactic, persuasive, and ideological functions. At the lexico-sematic level, somatic synecdoches with reverse metaphors and extended personifications reveal man and God’s close relationships and manifest the inclusion of interpersonal discourse. A didactic strategy is the underlying system-forming strategy of the studied RD. Its tactics include stigmatizing evaluation, exaggeration, rational argumentation, distancing, appealing to authority, and persistent repetition. It is principally aimed at teaching wisdoms and imparting sociocultural values.
In Karasik’s (2006) classification, the RD values and norms fall into the following groups:
| Values and norms in religious discourse | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| supermoral | moral | utilitarian | sub-utilitarian |
| man – God | man – another man | man – oneself | survival needs |
Many key concepts of the OT discourse have proven their interdiscursive nature. In the so-called retrospective psalms, the chronotope marked by artfully arranged spatial concepts occurs inside a complex temporal system, where the linear time of the institutional discourse is closely interwoven with the reversible time of the artistic and spiritual discourses.
According to Karasik (2006), the script-type macroconcept ‘faith’ is the main concept of RD. As the research findings indicate, it consists of the four continuously deploying and evolving frame-type concepts in the OT discourse:
| Basic frame concepts in the Old Testament discourse | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ‘Super-agent’ | ‘agents’ | ‘clients’ | ‘OT Judaism’ |
| God | patriarchs, prophets, priests (intermediaries) | ‘the righteous’ and ‘the wicked’, plants and animals, inanimate objects (creations) | a system of beliefs |
These frame concepts reveal continuous overlapping and interpenetration of various (including polar) worlds and forms of symbolic existence. The ‘Super-agent’ appears to be the most complex and multifaceted macro-concept due to its multi-layered structure and a high degree of abstractedness. It finds its symbolic representation in numerous explicit anthropomorphic and socially significant images (‘king’, ‘judge’, ‘warrior’, ‘vine gardener’, ‘plowman’, ‘shepherd’, ‘bridegroom’) and, interestingly, an implicit ‘mother bird’.
The discovered systemic relations bind together the key concepts, actors, chronotope, goals, values, norms, strategies, and tactics through the intricate patchwork of their recurrent cognitive and linguopoetic manifestations. By so doing, these intertextual and interdiscursive relations (re-)create and reinforce the highly ritualistic anthropocentric and activity-centered conceptual worldview in the studied RD reconstructed through the oldest English and Russian translations of the Book of Psalms.