The Secularisation of Religious Vocabulary against the Background of Social Change - Polish, Czech, Slovak and German

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Alicja Nagórko
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2009 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 134839852

The aim of the project, which started in the winter of 2011, is to complete a comparative online dictionary of German, Polish, Slovak and Czech religious vocabulary. The dictionary is designed as a reference tool for comparative linguistic and culturological research. The digital dictionary will be accessible at the web address www2.hu-berlin.de/sacrumprofanum/index.html (the web site is cur-rently not publicly available. Access, however, is possible with the user name dfg and the pass¬word lex2012). One of the main goals of the project is to describe the secularized use of originally religious terms. The macrostructure of the dictionary comprises 67 lemmas which are supposed to represent the core of the religious vocabulary used in contemporary standard language. The lem-mas are described from different points of view, such as connotations, lexical relations, word for-mation, collocations, idiomatic phrases and proverbs. Thus, the different facets of their meaning are expected to be revealed. The limited set of lemmas allows for a more detailed semantic analy¬sis than is usually found in descriptive dictionaries and enables us to describe such aspects as polysemy and new trends in word usage. Besides, the dictionary will offer information on etymol¬ogy and semantic change since 1945 against the background of socio-cultural differences between the four language communities in question. The use of religious vocabulary outside religious dis¬course is illustrated with numerous examples from advertisements and other spheres of mass cul¬ture. The results of the lexicographic analyses are subsequently discussed in special articles. The project relies not only on lexicographic works but also makes ample use of national corpora. The collected data are double-checked by native speakers of the four languages. A comparative analy¬sis of the use of religious vocabulary in the four Central European languages mentioned yields an insight into the mechanisms of lexical secularization that will be valuable not only for Slavic and general linguistics but also for other fields of research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants