The pragmatic strategy of praise in the texts of the collection of Dutch evangelical psalms

Abstract

The purpose of the paper is to identify ways to implement the speech macro strategy of praise to God for text material of the collection of Dutch evangelical psalms published in 1806. This article has three main parts. First, the article analyzes how the communicative intention of praise manifests itself in the prose text of the Preface to the Collection. Here the strategy is formulated in the third person; its implementation is most clearly observed in the initial and final positions of the text as the most communicatively loaded. Second, we consider ways in which a given strategy is implemented in the poetic texts of the psalms. In this perspective, the communicative task of glorifying the greatness of God is of the utmost importance; it is formulated directly on behalf of all believers using the following linguistic means and stylistic techniques: rhetorical exclamations and appeals to the Lord, rhetorical questions, lexical means of appropriate semantics and pragmatic potential. Third, the basic principles of interaction between the text of the psalms and the musical arrangement for the voice are discussed. The analysis allows us to conclude that with the help of harmonies and melodic drawing, the dictum and modus content of the poetic text is masterfully emphasized, the inner potential of meter and rhyme is more fully revealed. In general, the macro-strategy of praise has a dominant meaning and manifests itself in many aspects in the contamination of verbal and musical language.