Research on Humanities and Social Sciences www.iiste.org ISSN (Paper)2224-5766 ISSN (Online)2225-0484 (Online) Vol.5, No.19, 2015 13 “Fall and Die”, “Scatter by Fire”: Language of Emotion in Christian Liturgical Prayers Ezekiel Opeyemi Olajimbiti Department of English, University of Ibadan, Ibadan Abstract Prayer as a form of social interactions touches issues that affect people in every area of life. Its importance and sensitivity make people obsessed in getting their problems solved and needs met through it. Despite its importance in everybody’s life, little attempt has been made to study its language in Christian religion. Few studies have been on prayer and emotion management but without empirical evidence. None of these studies dealt with the pragmatics of emotions, using language to arouse the emotion of the laity in Christian prayer sessions. A gap this study fills. MFM’s prayer is an aggressive and warlike. Interest was created at studying how the Church pragmatically uses language, intentionally or unintentionally, to stimulate and arouse the emotions of the laity to be aggressive, enthusiastic and gestural in warfare prayers. Linguistic theories of emotion were employed in the identification, contextualisation of emotion types. Emotion types identified are classified into positive and negative. Negative emotions identified manifest anger and fear because the language of warfare prayers is confrontational and warlike. Positive emotions of excitement and relief are aroused through positive/ prophetic declarations that ignite the exciting feelings of the laity. Warfare prayer utterances in MFM consist of emotionology and metaphorical analogies which are lexically and contextually conceptualised with the aim of capturing the religious psycho-social experiences of the people. They also help in shaping of thoughts and cognitive mapping of religious experiences. The clergy in MFM use emotion-inducing stimuli metaphorically in communicating prayer utterances which automatically or reflexively trigger bodily responses from the laity described as cognitive pragmatic behavioural gestures. This study attempts a significant contribution to existing knowledge in Cognitive Linguistics in the Nigerian context by providing insightful knowledge on language of emotions in social interactions in Nigeria. Keywords: cognition, pragmatics, clergy, laity and MFM. Introduction There are different situations and contexts in which language usage and meaning may vary. That is why pragmatics has been described as the study of language in use, taking into cognisance the meaning in context (Mey 1994; Grundy, 1995; Black, 2006). Context has been defined as the spine of meaning of any utterance (Odebunmi, 2006). In other words, what accounts for the meaning of any form of communication is context. Schiffrin (1994:192) corroborates this view by saying ‘… yet speakers routinely use … utterances to mean considerably more than what is conveyed by their semantic meaning’. In essence, language is used in different contexts and situations to achieve different goals and meanings. In religious discourse, for instance, language is used to convey value and meaning because religious activities like prayer, sermon, song etc. are usually carried out by using formal and pragmatic features of everyday language which entails high sense of assumptions- speaker’s assumptions about the nature and workings of language- (Keane, 1997). The language of prayer, however, possesses emotive pragmatic and performative functions. By emotive pragmatic function, it means that it caters for cognition; the feelings, behaviour and even commitment (Fonagy 1981; Dorsey, & Morton, 2006; Surakrta, 2008). What then is emotion? Emotion can be defined as a complex, subjective experience accompanied by biological and behavioural changes (Meyers, 2004). It involves feelings, thinking, activation of the nervous system, physiological changes and behavioural changes. There are basic dimensions underlying our emotions. Some of them are: our experiences, views, thoughts, and may be cultural beliefs. Thoughts and emotions are inseparable, only that emotion depends on appraisal, the process of trigging, which brings about bodily changes. Every emotion is associated with a specific and different pattern of appraisal. That is why Frijda (1986) argues ‘emotions are action tendencies’. There is no doubt that emotion deals with arousal, which is why emotions are our bodies’ way of communicating with us. In a nutshell, emotion is part of human life responsible for the interpretation of bodily arousal (Tull, 2009; Grats, 2009). It is noteworthy that spiritual concepts reveal a great deal about our emotions, views, conceptual systems, sociocultural experiences and the way we interact with one another. Therefore, the language use in such a germane aspect of human life is worth studying. Braden (2000) draws the correlation between prayer and emotion thus: … prayer as ‘feeling’ then, stated another way, we are invited to find the equality of thought and emotion that produces such a feeling-living as if our prayer had already been answered. For how may we benefit from the effect of our thought and emotion, if each pattern is moving in a random direction?