"Use your language well!": a corpus-based semantic-pragmatic analysis of lexical and function words through the theory of language intensity

This paper presents a semantic-pragmatic analysis of the corpus of texts by Fr Hijacint Repič in »Cvetje z vertov sv. Frančiška« CVET 1.0 (Košir and Erjavec, 2024). The corpus comprises 230 texts of varying length with devotional content published by the Franciscan Fr Repič in Škrabec religious journal between 1887 and 1916. The corpus comprises texts of diverse genres, addressing a simple religious audience on Christian moral and educational themes. This study draws on insights from speech act theory (Austin, 1975) and the theory of the intensity of (Slovene) language (Mikolič, 2020) to examine the speech act of addressing the addressee in periodical articles. The proposition and its modifications are observed to influence the intensification of the message and its ultimate persuasiveness and effectiveness. In accordance with the communicator‘s intention and the function of the text – the prompt – we posit that in terms of illocutionary (influential) role, texts have both a cognitive (the purpose is to create new knowledge) and a guiding or prompting role (the influential role is the most explicit in them). Semantic and pragmatic lexical analysis will encompass lexical and function words that can modify the intensity of the wording in a direction that is either strengthening or weakening.