A Descriptive Survey of the Character of English Lexis in Sermons

This study investigated language use in the context of Christiansermons using the sermons of Pastor Chris Oyakhilome as a case study. The aim was toexamine the lexical characteristics of language in context to establish whether or notthe character of English lexis is determined by linguistic context or co-text. Ittherefore sought to discover whether there is a network of lexis peculiar to sermons:definite words associated with them, specific patterns of association or collocation,and peculiar meaning relations. In doing this, a corpus-computational technique wasadopted in which 200 actual sermons of Pastor Chris Oyakhilome were selected, built intoa corpus, then computer processed and compared with a reference corpus of contemporaryEnglish, which was chosen as a measure of normality. The results show major differences:Those words that were unusually frequent, and therefore the most significant in thesermons, were found to be unusually infrequent and therefore insignificant in generalEnglish, showing that the key lexis of the sermons is different from the key lexis ofgeneral English. This finding was strengthened by the differences recorded in thecollocation patterns of the words selected for detailed examination in both contexts,and by the variations in their semantic relations