Evangelical and Catholic Testimonies in the Perspective of Corpus-based Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of Roman Catholic (from the portal Deon.pl) and Protestant, Pentecostal (from the magazine Chrześcijanin et al.) Christian testimonies. Using the tools of corpus linguistics, the authors show the differences between both collections of texts. Especially interesting was the reconstruction of the „areas of sin”, the evils the testimony authors overcame thanks to God’s help. These are different spheres for both types of texts, in the case of Catholic testimonies it is formed by a semantic complex built around the terms of “love – sex – asceticism”, and Pentecostal testimonies are focused on the “stimulants – addictions – antisocial behaviour” complex. The analysis consisting of two stages (frequency, describing the role of keywords in the corpus, and visual recognition of the most important collocations) allowed us to formulate conclusions on the dominant areas of meaning which define the mental map of the religious life of the followers of both the Christian denominations.