Religious Metaphor and Ways of its Verbalization in English-Language Theological Texts

Abstract

The focus of this article is religious metaphor and linguistic ways of its realization in the space of theological discourse, broadly understood as a discourse about religion, represented by theological, journalistic and scientific texts. The English-language theological texts published in the theological journals “The American Journal of Biblical Theology” and “The Bible Magazine” have served as the research material. The starting methodological premise of the research is the idea that in the structure of metaphor there is a metaphorical core with main and metaphorical periphery additional metaphorical load. Based on the results of a practical analysis of factual material, the authors emphasize the weight of metaphor in these texts and highlight metaphorical models built on the principle of X is Y, i.e. based on the likening of two phenomena due to the predication of phenomenon X properties of phenomenon Y. The article presents a comparative analysis of two studies of religious metaphor carried out by the authors in 2015 and 2022, and also contains quantitative data representing the frequency of models of religious metaphor in the selection of texts and their partial verbalizers, acting as its core and periphery. The authors come to the conclusion that metaphor in religious discourse acts as an effective means of influencing the addressee, is characterized by dynamism and is conditioned by different extralinguistic factors. The dominance of the religious metaphor of positive evaluation in comparison with the negatively marked metaphor is proved, while the key part-of-speech verbalizers of both types of metaphors are, in the first case, nouns, verbs that make up the metaphorical core, and adjectives that represent the metaphorical periphery. In the second case, the metaphorical core is formed by nouns and adjectives, the metaphorical periphery is represented by verbs.