A corpus-based study of sermons to determine the stage of religious development

Determining the stage of development of a religious group from a corpus linguistics perspective is a research goal that is relatively unexplored. This paper discusses an innovative corpus-based methodology focusing on keyness which serves as a preliminary study to set up the appropriacy of the methodology for further research on determining the stage of development of a cultlike religious group. The paper focuses on the methodological principles including corpora selection based on the stages of religious development (namely mainstream religion, sect, cult, and destructive cult), units of linguistic features for data interpretation, the use of keyness methods and statistic, thresholds, and benchmark corpora preparation for characterizing and categorizing the sermons of a cultlike religious group. These procedures are then used to examine the sermons of a target religious group to determine its stage of development. The criteria we established to address the methodological issues provided us with a systematic process to identify the key linguistic items in the sermons, which allowed us to describe the social characteristics of the stages of religious development as part of the procedures to see the stage of development of a cultlike religious group.