2018-2019 Faculty Research Grants
Julia Kim and Beverly Matiko (English)
Power, Ideology, and Linguistic Choices in the Discourse on Women's Ordination: A Sudy of Three Roman Catholic Documents
This study is part of ongoing research, which focuses on how power and ideology are manifest through linguistic choices in religious discourse on women’s ordination. The current research examines how text producers’ linguistic and discursive choices contribute to sustaining power and power relations in the church as they justify the current position of the Roman Catholic Church on women’s ordination. The study analyzes three official Roman Catholic texts: “Declaration: On the Question of Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood,” “Ordination Sacerdotalis of John Paull II,” and “Women and Priesthood.” Drawing from Fairclough’s three dimensional discourse framework, we focus on the following questions: 1) What ideological message is embedded in the linguistic features? 2) What are the text producers doing by virtue of producing it? and 3) What role does a discourse play as a part of processes of social struggle, within a matrix of relations of power? We identify passive voice and transivity in order to understand how people and objects are portrayed. We also examine deictic pronouns, lexicon, and modality to understand the text creators’ level of formality, assumed audience, attitudes towards women, and commitment to the claims being made. In addition, we identify presuppositions, which carry essentialized views but are in fact unfair and manipulative. Features identified in these steps will help identify any dilemmas or inconsistencies that may exist in the arguments and understand how linguistic choices contribute to sustaining the power and power relations within the Roman Catholic Church concerning women’s ordination.