Audience interaction in Trubar’s sermon on faith: A systemic functional analysis

This paper examines the interactional aspects of Trubar’s sermon on faith from the Catechism of 1550 (2008), analysing how the preacher engages with his audience through language. Drawing on Hyland’s concepts of stance and engagement (2005) and Cloran’s concept of rhe­torical units (1994), the study examines the dominant interactional rhetorical units in Trubar’s sermon from a discourse semantics perspective. The findings indicate that the rhetorical units of Reflection and Avocation signal the presence of the author and/or the addressee in the text, while the rhetorical units of Generalization, Conjecture, Rhetorical questions, and Re­ported speech function to engage the addressee and encourage adherence to Jesus’ teachings. Through these linguistic devices, Trubar, as the preacher, establishes a strong interactive con­nection with his silent audience.