Religious language within Jürgen Habermas and cognitive linguistics

• Main Author: Derkson, Kyle
• Other Authors: MacKendrick, Kenneth (Religion) Janzen, Terry (Linguistics)
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: cognitive linguistics; religious language; Jürgen Habermas; George Lakoff; religion; Mark Johnson; Formal Pragmatics; Ritual Praxis; Linguistification of the Sacred; Metaphor; Image Schema; Moral Metaphors
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1993/24048

Religious language has been theorized in multiple ways. I will look at how religious language has been theorized in the work of Jürgen Habermas and in the field of cognitive linguistics. I will compare these approaches to religious language and assess the results. In doing so, I will indirectly assess the confluence of these two theoretical approaches. My conclusion is that even with the similarities between these theoretical frames, religion is thematized differently under each method. Jürgen Habermas’s definition of religion as the output of ritual praxis is not compatible with the normative place of religious language found in cognitive linguistics.