“Spirituality” and “Religion”- corpus analysis of subjective definitions in the questionnaire
The chapter examines free text entries in the Bielefeld-based Cross-cultural Study of “Spirituality” written in response to the questions: “How would you define the term spirituality?” and “How would you define the term religion?” The aim is to explore subjective understandings by paying attention t...
| Published in: | Semantics and psychology of spirituality |
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| Authors: | ; |
| Format: | Electronic/Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Springer
2016
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| In: |
Semantics and psychology of spirituality
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (doi) Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | The chapter examines free text entries in the Bielefeld-based Cross-cultural Study of “Spirituality” written in response to the questions: “How would you define the term spirituality?” and “How would you define the term religion?” The aim is to explore subjective understandings by paying attention to the language use of participants, following the assumption that the language use of people writing texts about what they would call “spirituality” or “religion” will provide new insight in subjective and cultural meaning of both terms. Therefore, the chapter opts for a decisive bottom-up perspective on semantics which is realized by a corpus linguistic approach looking for linguistic patterns with a particular focus on key word analysis and semantic classification. In detail, the chapter addresses the following questions: Can we identify linguistic patterns in subjective definition s of “spirituality” and “religion” that differ (1) by cultural-linguistic context , (2) by semantic context, and (3) by personal context (“spiritual”/“religious” self-identifications). Main results related to these questions are: (1) “Spirituality” and “religion” compete in the same semantic field being more similar than expected; the cultural-linguistic difference between the German and the US sample is rather low. (2) Directly compared to “spirituality,” the semantic profile of “religion” is quite reduced to systemic aspects, while “spirituality” attracts a wide range of possible meanings in the field of contrasting poles like “body and soul,” “knowing and feeling,” “spirit and nature,” “connectedness and openness.” (3) Language use differs significantly according to “spiritual”/“religious” self-identification so that a specific set of key words for each group of participants can be identified: words that are both typically chosen and avoided while speaking about “spirituality” or “religion.” |
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| ISBN: | 3319212443 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Semantics and psychology of spirituality
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-21245-6_8 DOI: 10.15496/publikation-32304 HDL: 10900/90923 |