Charles A. Ferguson

THE BLESSING OF THE LORD BE UPON YOU

This collection of Charles Fergusons papers on Arabic linguistics includes a biographical sketch (with excerpts from interviews with him) documenting the career and contributions of a pioneer in American linguistics. Four sections include: Diachronica, Phonology, Register and Genre, and General.

Some Forms of Religious Discourse

Every speech community includes in its linguistic repertoire particular »forms of discourse« which have characteristic internal, i. e. linguistic, structure and characteristic patterns of use, i. e. sociolinguistic contexts in which they are appropriate. Examples of such forms of discourse might include sudi varied phenomena as polite formulas of greeting, epic poems, ritual mantras, scientific papers, or children’s counting-out rhymes. Such forms of discourse have been studied for centuries by literary critics, literary historians, folklorists, and others, and a wealth of descriptive and interpretive material is available on a very wide range of such forms at various levels of generality and in differing classifications. With increasingly sophisticated tools of linguistic analysis becoming available, new lines of internal analysis of forms of discourse open up, and current linguistic research is slowly extending itself into the analysis of forms of discourse (e. g. Longacre 1972). Similarly new approaches to the study of the use of language offer paradigms of analysis for the role of forms of discourse in socio-cultural systems (e. g. Hymes 1967). In the present paper I would like to encourage students of human language behavior to utilize these new possibilities for the analysis of forms of religious discourse in various societies and from different perspectives, and to offer a fragmentary analysis of certain language phenomena of contemporary English-speaking Christian communities as a sample.