Jan Stanislav Institute of Slavistics SAS
Topic
Letters to God as a Specific Expression of Prayer from The Aspect of Pragmalinguistics
PhD. program
Year of admission
2026
Name of the supervisor
Prof. PhDr. ThDr. Peter Zubko, PhD.
Contact:
Receiving school
Univerzita Konštantína Filozofa v Nitre
Annotation
The work is methodologically based on the theory of speech acts, which was formed as a reaction to the change in the scientific matrix in linguistics, when the attention of linguists was focused on communication, i.e. language "in vivo". It is assumed that the empirical part of the research will have two parts.
In the part of the work that maps letters addressed to God in artistic literature, a communicative-pragmatic approach to the literary work is applied, based on the theory of speech acts. A literary work that is composed as a letter to the Most High, or rather it is part of the artistic image of the world, is understood as a set of specific speech acts in the context of literary and social relations. The epicenter of attention is the author's intention, projected into the illocutionary act. In addition to the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary act, reference is also understood as a speech act. The analyses focus on the referencing of a literary character; referential expressions are proper nouns, pronouns and more or less developed substantive expressions.
In the part of the work that is focused on the analysis of authentically, i.e. non-fictionally, created letters addressed to God, the author of the dissertation can focus on children's letters written to Jesus, but also on reflections whose authors could be young people. Their examination from the aspect of speech act theory should be directed towards structuring depending on what performative acts of communication are involved: questions, requests, promises, wishes, constitutive acts, etc.
One of the first, if not the first, letters of this kind can be considered the "Confessions" of St. Augustine, which represents a mixture of the genres of confession and autobiography. German mystics (Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister Eckhart, later - Jakob Böhme, Emanuel Swedenborg), when they spoke of the personal direct communication of man with God and the connection of the human soul with the Absolute, did not mean that such contact should be carried out through writing.
In artistic literature, a letter to God as a separate work or its excerpt is rarely found due to its uniqueness. Contribution of the work: by obtaining authentic texts, the author can contribute to the expansion of the database of texts in the Slovak National Corpus
In the part of the work that maps letters addressed to God in artistic literature, a communicative-pragmatic approach to the literary work is applied, based on the theory of speech acts. A literary work that is composed as a letter to the Most High, or rather it is part of the artistic image of the world, is understood as a set of specific speech acts in the context of literary and social relations. The epicenter of attention is the author's intention, projected into the illocutionary act. In addition to the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary act, reference is also understood as a speech act. The analyses focus on the referencing of a literary character; referential expressions are proper nouns, pronouns and more or less developed substantive expressions.
In the part of the work that is focused on the analysis of authentically, i.e. non-fictionally, created letters addressed to God, the author of the dissertation can focus on children's letters written to Jesus, but also on reflections whose authors could be young people. Their examination from the aspect of speech act theory should be directed towards structuring depending on what performative acts of communication are involved: questions, requests, promises, wishes, constitutive acts, etc.
One of the first, if not the first, letters of this kind can be considered the "Confessions" of St. Augustine, which represents a mixture of the genres of confession and autobiography. German mystics (Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister Eckhart, later - Jakob Böhme, Emanuel Swedenborg), when they spoke of the personal direct communication of man with God and the connection of the human soul with the Absolute, did not mean that such contact should be carried out through writing.
In artistic literature, a letter to God as a separate work or its excerpt is rarely found due to its uniqueness. Contribution of the work: by obtaining authentic texts, the author can contribute to the expansion of the database of texts in the Slovak National Corpus