Religious style in modern prayer texts – exemplary analyses

Abstract

The article presents a characteristics of the religious style as a variety of modern Polish. This style is shown as a polarized and polymorphic category, open to other varieties of the language. In the analytical part the author focuses on description of those features of the religious style that are a continuation of the past. She shows such stylistic properties in the prayer texts as stereotyping, formulaicity, hieraticism and dialogicality, as promoted by the Catholic Church today (in the 21st century). Grammatical and lexical exponents of these features, i.e. forms treated as archaic, bookish and obsolete distance communication thus formed from the colloquial language.