Features explaining the effectiveness of the spoken sermon and features demonstrating subtleties of communication of this manner will become apparent through investigation into the sound and structure of the recording

The first 200 words of this essay...

Introduction

The topic of religious language has many facets for exploration. The area of research for this coursework revolves around a recording taken in the due course of an evangelical church service. This section is known as the sermon.

The recording was drawn from the first part of the sermon. In this, the pastor, the leader of the service, set up the ideas of what the talk would involve and made reference to various texts from the Christian religion's book of authority, the Bible.

Parts of the transcription are spoken from notes, others from memory or improvisation, while other parts are read aloud from a written text. The differences between these are of interest as they incur changes and variations in tone, emphasis, speed, volume and other areas of prosodics.

Factors inherent to the type of language, audience and purpose will be the focus of the study. It will also be necessary to include comments on persuasion, inference and the overall aim of the sermon. All these will be able to be identified from the various grammatical, lexical and phonological markers.

I decided to use this topic as the basis of my work as I