ON THE ISSUE OF THEOLINGUISTICS’ STATUS IN MODERN LINGUISTICS

The paper is devoted to the analysis of theolinguistics, an incipient philological branch at the junction of theology, religious anthropology and linguistics. Having appeared in the 70-s of the 20-th century theolinguistics was meant as a branch of linguistics seeking to describe how human discourse may be employed to refer to the divine and how language operates in ‘religious’ situations. Further developments of this branch of learning broadened the scope of scientific interests to the study of the relationship between language and religious thought and practice illustrated by ritual, sacred texts, preaching, doctrinal statements and private affirmations of belief. Slavonic linguists took up the idea of the western philologists at the end of the 20-th century. Since then they have been working out a generic system of theolinguistics including its terminological apparatus, methodology, goals and tasks. The main difficulties theolinguistics is confronted with can be both of objective and subjective characters. The main objective problem is gnoseological roots of its constituents (scientific and theological). On the other hand it is inhomogeneity of theolinguistics, that can be helpful to solve many problems incapable of being solved by means of purely scientific methods.