The Dynamics of Confessional Conceptual Spheres of the English-Speaking Society in the Socio-Communicative Context

Abstract

In the context of a review of main religious, cultural and political events in England in the epoch of the XV-XVII centuries and modern Britain and the USA over the past 42 years, it is made a comparison of the frequency of the same typical Christian notions of English from the EEBO database containing samples of English texts from 1470 to 1690, and the BNC - modern British English and CoCa - modern American English as a whole for the period from 1980 to 2022. In these temporal cuts of English some confessional concepts caused by Christianity with the highest frequency are identified, the dynamics of decreasing in the number of these concepts by almost two times is examined, as well as a decrease of their frequency up to the loss of the status of a concept in the modern era thanks to the processes of secularization of the English-speaking society. The reasons of the small and minimal frequency of a row of Christian concepts in the indicated temporal cuts of English language are analyzed.