Why do we address God in an informal (familiar) way?

Slide 1: Why do we address God in an informal (familiar) way? (Florina Lecture on Social Deixis) by Borislav Guéorguiév New Bulgarian University

Slide 2: What does “informal” mean? not formal; specif. a) not according to prescribed or fixed customs, rules, ceremonies, etc. b) casual, easy, unceremonious, or relaxed; c) designed for use or wear on everyday occasions; d) not requiring formal dress e) colloquial. ©1995 Zane Publishing, Inc. ©1994, 1991, 1988 Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Slide 3: Nota Bene! b) casual, easy, unceremonious(?), or relaxed c) designed for use or wear on everyday occasions

Slide 4: Evidence for addressing God informally (praying etc.) Using, in generally, the T-forms (R. Brown & A. Gilman, ‘The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity’ in T. A. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language, MIT Press, 1960, pp. 253-76) in our prayers to God.

Slide 5: Отче наш/Lord’s prayer Отче наш, Който си на небесата! Да се свети Твоето име; да дойде Твоето царство; да бъде Твоята воля, както на небето, тъй и на Земята; насъщния ни хляб дай ни днес и прости нам дълговете ни, както и ние прощаваме на длъжниците си; и не въведи нас в изкушение, но избави ни от лукавия; защото Твое е царството, и силата, и славата вовеки. Амин!

Slide 6: T-forms vs. V-forms T-forms are: V-forms are: • • Sign of power Sign of solidarity • • Sign of comitativity Sign of cooperation (as used by H.P. (as used by Charles Grice) Fillmore) • • Sign of formal Sign of collaboration talking • Sign of informal talking

Slide 7: Do we always talk to God using the familiar form? Let's look at two scenes from Peter Schaffer & Milos Forman's motion picture \"Amadeus\", including two very remarkable addresses to God by the jealous court composer Antonio Salieri.

Slide 8: Formal/Informal manner of speaking It is a typical topic of the pragmatic study of language and of other sign systems. Pragmatics is the study of meaning comprehension in language use, as well as in some non-verbal sign systems. Main topics in pragmatics include communication models, deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, discourse analysis, and conversational structure.

Slide 9: Formal/Informal manner of speaking • It is closely related to the problem of social deixis in human communication. • The term deixis is borrowed from the Greek word δειξις for pointing or indicating, and has as prototypical or focal exemplars the use of demonstratives, first and second person pronouns, tense, specific time and place adverbs like now and here.

Slide 10: DEIXIS The term deixis was coined by the German psychologist Karl Bühler in his very famous book Sprachtheorie (1934). So, when we study deixis we in fact study how people use indicative signs (as used by Peirce) in communication through the discourse analysis of their indicative propositions, included in their utterances.

Slide 11: DEIXIS Essentially, deixis is concerned with the way languages encode or grammaticalize features of the context of utterances or speech events, and thus it also examines the ways in which the interpretation of an utterance depends on the analysis of its context.

Slide 12: Categories of Deixis • Person deixis • Spatial deixis • Temporal deixis • Discourse (or text) deixis • Social deixis

Slide 13: Social Deixis It refers to \"that aspect of sentences which reflect or establish or are determined by certain realities of the social situation in which the speech act occurs\" (Charles Fillmore, Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis, 1971. Mimeo, Indiana University Linguistics Club)

Slide 14: Social Deixis Stephen Levinson. Pragmatics. Cambridge UP. 1983 It refers to \"those aspects of language structure that encode the social identities of participants (properly, incumbents of participant- roles), or the social relationship between them, or between one of them and person and entities referred to\".

Slide 15: Social Deixis Borislav Guéorguiév Is a metaphor of the metaphor ‘spacial deixis’ that indicates the vertical distance in a virtual space, which we are used to call ‘social’, between two or more persons/things, expressed in a symbolic way, using what is grammaticalized and lexicalized in language.