Språkbruk och interaktion i en svensk pingstförsamling : En kommunikationsetnografisk studie : a study in the ethnography of communication

Sammanfattning: This dissertation is based on the assumption that text and context form an integrated, indissoluble whole when meanings are created, renegotiated and interpreted in human interaction in different speech events. With the aid of a combination of ethnographic and conversation-analytical methods an investigation is made of the ways in which a number of members of a Pentecostal church in a medium-sized Swedish town interact with one another and with persons who have not made a personal avowal as Christians. Participant observations were carried out during the period 1989-94, and the taped material comprises 13 conversationlike interviews, three coffee-break conversations and a dinner conversation. All the recordings are of "natural" conversations, which is to say that it was not a question of experiments with controlled variables.The dissertation contains a description of how words, phrases and modes of expression are taken from the Bible, from the services and from other sources common to the Movement, to be used again and adapted to different situations. Persons who have long been members of a community characterised by an endeavour to attain one particular goal have acquired similar experience. In the interaction between them, there is much that can be taken for granted or simply hinted at. The communication is thereby economical-a single seemingly disconnected word can convey something which it would require a lengthy exposition to convey to an outsider.It also emerges that elderly Pentecostals who have devoted much of their lives to the church have acquired a pious, Biblically coloured mode of expression, that the middle-aged and young who are frequently in contact with non-Christians avoid such a mode of expression or set it within a jocular framework, and that the newly saved overuse it in order to exhibit their new group membership.