Reaching toward a full lexical description of the Southern Baptist sermon sublanguage

This project identifies the 168 lexical items thought to most mark the Southern Baptist sermon sublanguage and explores the ways in which some of these items behave (see chapter five for a full discussion). Before reaching its ultimate goal, this project achieves several important goals. It provides a historical discussion of the terms most important to this type of study: register; sublanguage; and, corpus (see chapter one), a discussion of previous descriptive work concerned with the religious sublanguage (see chapter two), and a discussion of the frameworks available for those wanting to isolate sublanguages from one another or for creating a corpus (see chapter three). The present project also provides a full description of the Corpus of Southern Baptist Sermons (CSBS), which is the collection of texts that allows identification of the conclusions reached (see chapter four). In the end, this project becomes the fullest investigation of the Southern Baptist sermon sublanguage to date and a necessary step toward understanding the religious sublanguage more fully