The Peculiarities of the Psalms Functioning in Anglican Church Service

Abstract

This paper’s aim is to define the role of Psalms in Anglican Church service and to identify basic lexical syntactic means adding expressiveness to these texts. The scope of the research is built from texts of psalms in English used in Anglican services. The object of the research is identified as Anglican service containing psalms. Texts of two English language prayers from Morning Prayer pronounced by archbishops of Anglican church (Archbishop of Canterbury J.Carry in 2011 and Archbishop of Canterbury R.Williams in 2008) during common prayer were selected for investigation. Psalms are not just a prayer, it is a prayer written in verse. European poetry that we are so familiar with is based on rhythm and rhyme. Psalms are organized in a different way. Semitic poetry is organized on the basis of meaningful parallelisms. In our work we used the classical scheme developed by an Anglican bishop Robert Lowth who identifies the following kinds of parallelisms: 1. Synonymic parallelism 2. Antithetic parallelism 3. Synthetic (progressive or ascending) parallelism 4. Chiasmus As a result of the work done in the course of our investigation we can say that a psalm is one of the most interesting and colourful genres of religious discourse that concentrates and disseminates central intentions and primary aims of religious discourse of which a religious service is a big part. These aims include strengthening in faith, presenting the Divine knowledge, and they reflect the leading strategies in the development of psalms, those of prayer, confession and assessment.

Keywords

• псалми
• англіканське богослужіння
• релігійний дискурс
• молитовна поезія