Invocation or apostrophe?
Prayer and the conversation frame in public discourse
We investigate how idioms of prayer operate along a complex set of rhetorical dimensions, all of which take the conversation frame as a starting point. We present results of a search of idioms from the UCLA NewsScape archive. After distinguishing invocationary acts of the divine from the more “fossilized” apostrophic (i.e. fictive) reference to the divine, we propose a four-dimensional model of prayer. Each dimension is an axis bounded by two poles: factive/
fictive, pathos, ethos, and attitude. Instances of prayer often manifest alignments and misalignments along one or more of these axes.
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