Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

The aim of the project, which started in the winter of 2011, is to complete a comparative online dictionary of German, Polish, Slovak and Czech religious vocabulary. One of the major objectives of the project is to describe the secularized use of originally religious terms. The macrostructure of the dictionary comprises 67 lemmas which are supposed to represent the core of the religious vocabulary used in contemporary standard language. The lemmas are described from different points of view, such as connotations, lexical relations, word formation, collocations, idiomatic phrases and proverbs. Thus, the different facets of their meaning are expected to be revealed. The limited set of lemmas allows for a more detailed semantic analysis than is usually found in descriptive dictionaries and enables us to describe such semantic aspects as polysemy and new trends in word usage. Besides, the dictionary will offer information on etymology and semantic change since 1945 against the background of socio-cultural differences between the four language communities in question. The use of religious vocabulary outside religious discourse is illustrated with numerous examples from advertisements and other spheres of mass culture. The results of the lexicographic analyses are subsequently discussed in special articles. The project relies not only on lexicographic works but also makes ample use of national corpora. The collected data are double-checked by native speakers of the four languages. A comparative analysis of the use of religious vocabulary in the four Central European languages mentioned yields an insight into the mechanisms of lexical secularization that will be valuable not only for Slavic and general linguistics but also for other fields of research."" lang=EN-GB>