A descriptive survey of the character of English lexis in sermons

Abstract

This study investigated language use in the context of Christian sermons using the sermons of Pastor Chris Oyakhilome as a case study. The aim was to examine the lexical characteristics of language in context to establish whether or not the character of English lexis is determined by linguistic context or co-text. It therefore sought to discover whether there is a network of lexis peculiar to sermons: definite words associated with them, specific patterns of association or collocation, and peculiar meaning relations. In doing this, a corpus-computational technique was adopted in which 200 actual sermons of Pastor Chris Oyakhilome were selected, built into a corpus, then computer processed and compared with a reference corpus of contemporary English, which was chosen as a measure of normality. The results show major differences: Those words that were unusually frequent, and therefore the most significant in the sermons, were found to be unusually infrequent and therefore insignificant in general English, showing that the key lexis of the sermons is different from the key lexis of general English. This finding was strengthened by the differences recorded in the collocation patterns of the words selected for detailed examination in both contexts, and by the variations in their semantic relations.