Language and Stylistic Features of the Orthodox Media Sermon

Abstract

The author presents an analysis of the linguistic and stylistic features of the Orthodox media sermon of the famous priest Dimitry Smirnov, posted on his multimedia blog. Based on the problems of scientific work, the study is based on the works of leading and foreign media linguists and experts in the field of studying the genre of sermon. It is shown that creative work with the lexical and phraseological funds of the literary language through semantic transformations is updated through the emergence of new connotations, semantic neologisms, transformed phraseological units, which as a result leads to the renewal and strengthening of linguistic expression and contributes to the achievement of the linguo-pragmatic goals of the preacher. The genre of the sermon has specific linguistic features: the traditional address to the audience at the beginning of the sermon and its traditional completion, a large number of names of Jesus Christ, the mention of biblical precedent names and toponyms, implicit and explicit citation of the texts of Holy Scripture, etc. When working with preaching media content, two micro-conclusions were found and one general conclusion that sums up the entire sermon, which indicates a clearly built speech strategy that pursues specific linguo-pragmatic goals: to convey to the audience the main gospel meanings associated with Christ’s Resurrection. The well-thought-out speech strategy and tactics of the preacher purposefully focus the audience’s attention on important Christian issues through which the missionary function of the Orthodox media discourse is realized.