Spirituality According to Contemporary People: An Analysis of Linguistic Data

Abstract

The study aims at describing the spirituality of contemporary people as noticed in language.
250 textual passages were subject to the analysis and they were excerpted from the National Corpus of Polish as well as looking up entries via Google browser. Because of the extensive occurrences of lexeme spirituality, and of its forms, the survey was narrowed down to the explanations which have a graphic shape of definition or which can be brought down to such by means of simple transformations. Expressions like those mentioned, which commonly appear directly after the term, thus introduce it into the text: Spirituality is… or Spirituality means…

The expression “the explanations which have a graphic shape of definition” signals the fact that very rarely is the term given a (taxonomic) definition, as understood in logic. Yet, these are in most cases only pseudo-definitions.

The textual passages analysed have been categorised according to the following aspects:
– Categorisation: scope(s) within which the pseudo-definition places the content of the term ‘spirituality’
– Type of text from which they are derived
– Provenance of worldview
– Author’s specialisation (in the case of a publication).

A comparison of the findings with those from the study carried out about 10 years ago shows new areas of phenomena to which the expression ‘spirituality’ is referred. In general, these comprise physicality, physiology (including sex), business, material wealth, everyday life, and all surrounding reality.