The Church lexicon as a lexical category

The article focuses on the study of church lexicon as a lexical category. The aim of this article is to analyze and compare different linguistic points of view on the key stages of church lexicon development in the Russian and English languages, to determine a working definition of the category “church lexicon”, as well as its most important elements. In order to achieve this goal, the methods of analyzing sources, their subsequent comparison and contrast, identification of analogies and similarities were used, as well as synthesis of information extracted from these sources. The material includes dissertations, scientific articles and other works of modern Russian scholars considering the concepts “church lexicon” and “religious lexicon”, comparing and juxtaposing them, as well as singling out constituent elements of the categories “church lexicon”, “religious lexicon”, “sacral lexicon”, and “liturgical lexicon”. In this article are used the works of such scholars as A.A. Azarov, I.V. Bugaeva, S.V. Bulavina, N.S. Valgina, R.I. Goryushina, E.V. Kakorina, I.A. Koroleva, T.I. Kosheleva and others. The results of the research show that the interest in the church lexicon as a lexical category among Russian linguists has increased since the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries due to the revival of the Christian Church of various denominations, as well as other religious organizations. The long period of persecution of the Christian Church in Russia has affected church vocabulary, marginalizing it and relegating it to the periphery of the language. In the UK, USA and other English-speaking linguistic communities, the activities of the Christian Church have never been banned or persecuted, and the history of church vocabulary in the English language as such has never faced marginalization similar to that in Russia. It has also been established that church vocabulary is part of the broader category of “religious vocabulary” and includes basic concepts from the sphere of the life of the Christian Church. Although scholars argue about the constituents of the category “church lexicon”, many agree that it includes the names of sacraments and rites, elements of the church calendar, names of church buildings and their elements, items of decoration, elements of vestments, as well as names of persons in relation to the Christian faith and the Christian Church. This article may be of interest to philologists, linguists, and teachers of the Russian and English languages.