As dimensões da fé: sete religiões mundiais em uma análise multidimensional lexical

Abstract

Religious faith is a long-standing feature of humankind, which influences interpersonal relations in terms of moral values and attitudes. The major world religions have each a set of holy books on which their faith is based, which comprise their major teachings, stories and values shared by the followers. Therefore, understanding religious discourse is essential for perceiving how faith may impact on society. Following Biber’s (1988) and Berber Sardinha’s (2019) multi-dimensional analysis models, I have carried out a comprehensive study of the holy books of the world’s major religions to identify the most representative themes in them through a lexical multi-dimensional analysis. This type of analysis allows for the identification of the underlying parameters of variation across the texts, which in turn signal the discourses that shape the religions. Importantly, the dimensions enable a comparison across the various faiths, providing a means to verify the extent to which the various religions are similar or different with respect to the themes evoked by their texts. The corpus for this study consists of the dogmatic texts in English from seven religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islamism, Judaism, Kardecist Spiritism, Mormonism, and Protestantism. The major books for each religion were collected and saved into electronic format, each representing chapters or sub-chapters and then they were fully tagged and lemmatized with the Tree-Tagger; the lemmas were counted, and their normed counts were entered in a factorial analysis in SPSS. Six factors were extracted, including 285 lemmas. These lemmas were concordanced in WordSmith 7 to help the interpretive process. Each factor received an interpretive label to indicate the major underlying discourses, such as, for example, morality and worship. The texts were scored on each dimension, and the scores were compared across the religions on each dimension. In addition to the lexical multi-dimensional analysis, I carried out a cluster analysis to identify the main text types according to the lexical correlations and a discriminant analysis to verify if texts displayed characteristics of their own religious groups. In this study, the six identified lexical dimensions and the text types will be introduced, and the similarities and differences across the religious texts will be discussed