Festive congratulation message as a text type of religious-publicistic discourse

Résumé

Statement of the problem. The article analyzes features of festive congratulation messages dedicated to important Christian and Muslim holidays. The religious communication sphere is broader than any specific fuction, as it comprises genres of different functional styles, including publicistic one. Religious-publicistic style has got an informative function, and a value and assessment ones. Persuasive function as an unalienable element of religious discourse, is characteristic for religious publicist style as well. The relevance of the work is determined by growing importance of religious communication in the contemporary society, the necessity to study methods and ways of persuasive influence in verbal communication. Besides, the article contributes to comparative cross-confessional linguistic studies, which are not numerous yet.

The aim of the article is to analyze the festive congratulation messages which is achieved through realizing the following tasks: to define component contents of a festive congratulation message, its features, place in field structure of religious discourse, to conduct a comparative component and topic analysis of the messages belonging to two confessions: Christianity and Islam.

Research results. The analysis of the messages revealed that text type “festive congratulation message” is represented by six types: “sermon”, “congratulation”, “epistle”, “appeal”, “greeting”, “word”. Festive congratulation message belongs to religious-publicistic discourse in its close periphery zone as it can be used in both religious and secular situations. Festive congratulation message has got features of three types of discourses: religious, publicistic and festive, and has got three topic components — phatic, information-educational and moral-nurturing parts.

Conclusion. The analysed texts of the festive congratulation messages of the two confessions revealed the component and topic similarities of these text types. The similarity is determined by the purpose of the texts and informative and persuasive functions. The differences of the phatic parts lie in different structure of parish/umma, the information-educational and moral-nurturing parts are not marked as different.