Zasada analogii w homiliach kierowanych do odbiorcy dziecięcego
Analogy in homilies addressed to children

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the principle of analogy in contemporary Polish Catholic homilies addressed to children. Searching for an analogy between a liturgical text and human life is a very important element of a homily as a variant of a sermon, especially a homily to children, because the main aim of this type of sermon is discovering what a sacred text (the Bible) says to contemporary man. The article is based on over sixty homilies for children recorded in Cracow Catholic churches in the years 1994-2005. For comparison a similar number of homilies for adults were used. In the paper different more or less conventional ways of reference to human life are discussed. It appears that preachers very often use cognitive schemata, for example so called scripts and scenes, to facilitate understanding. At the level of language these schemata may be a basis of multiword expressions that have a constant function in a given text type and that occur repeatedly in the same situations. These collocations may be characteristic of a given functional style (register of language) and of a given speech genre and a sub-genre, in this case for a homily for children as a speech sub-genre. Searching for analogy seems to fulfill two main functions in homilies: explanation and actualiation (reference to the contemporary listener’s situation). Regarding explanation, there is a great creativity in the authors of sermons, whereas actualiation is very schema- 344 Stylistyka XXI tic, especially in respect to ethical problems, presented on the example of linguistic images of good and bad deeds, images that are fixed in repeated collocations. It is appropriate to ask why ethical problems in homilies for children are discussed in a schematic and stereotypical way. It may result from the genre features of the homily, in which a sacred text is input, or may result from an over simplified image of the child’s world, which preachers have. To explain this problem it would be useful to analye the language of other types of sermons and the language of religious education.

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