The Virgin Mary, the Apocalypse, and the Internet: A cognitive linguistic analysis of discourse at a Marian apparition site

This project is an interdisciplinary study that combines cognitive approaches to psychology, linguistics, anthropology and religious studies to study the syntactic and semantic encoding of agency in discourse. The discourse in this case are accounts of traditional signs and divine encounters gathered from pilgrims at a Marian apparition site in Conyers, Georgia; and from an electronic mailing list, the Apparitions-List (APAR-L), devoted to discussing believers' experiences with the Virgin Mary.;It was hypothesized that when describing their encounters with the supernatural, pilgrims will adopt a strategy of reducing their own agency in the event described, while the same time emphasizing the source and reliability of their knowledge. Pilgrims' narratives were coded for five different linguistic devices that English speakers can use to reduce speaker agency and mark the source and reliability of knowledge: (1) perceptual metaphors for knowledge, (2) modals, (3) passive constructions, (4) modification of sentence subjects and agents, and (5) framing devices.;Two comparisons were conducted to test whether these linguistic devices occurred in particular patterns that were indicative of their discourse function. The comparisons were (1) between autobiographical narratives of religious and secular experiences; and (2) between elicited and non-elicited narratives of religious experiences.;The length of narratives, purpose of communication, frequency and type of reported miracles, presence of "forbidden" divine entities, and use of more or less complete pilgrimage scripts, all varied between groups. An analysis of linguistic devices that reduce agency shows that in spite of the structural differences between the different groups of narratives, those aspects of pilgrims' underlying models of self and agency that are evoked when recounting secular and religious experiences do not appear to vary greatly. This could represent a consistent strategy for reduction of agency that pilgrims use across various contexts of communication, but this cannot be determined without a control group of subjects who do not subscribe to the same religious beliefs as the Conyers pilgrims. Follow-up studies are proposed and implications for further studies of language and of religious groups are discussed.