A Research On Secularization Of The Twelve Apostles' Names In The Bible Based On CSP~+ Model

Secularization refers to the historical process of change,that is,the social and cultural significance of religion has been weakened after the modernization and religion gradually becomes a private business and is depoliticized in the public domain(Callum G.B.&Michael S.,2010;Frank J.L.,et al.,2003).Twelve apostles of Jesus are called saints whose names are widely circulated.With secularization of religion,these names gradually fade their religious colors,changing from sacred to secular,and produce new social connotations.Nowadays studies of secularization in domestic and abroad focus on the religion field.Studies from linguistics field can be described as very few,and researches based on characters'names are nearly a blank.Cognitive reference point theory reflects the activation of the psychological space(conceptual domain),salience theory determines the relationship between cognitive reference point and psychological space,and prototype theory combined with character analysis can solve the problem of the selection of the cognitive reference point.They have a strong explanatory power to the naming mechanism.Based on this,this study takes advantage of these three theories to integrate a CSP~+model(C represents the cognitive reference point theory;S represents the salience theory;P represents the prototype theory;~+represents social ideology,emphasis,etc.)to study the names of secularization of twelve apostles with the help of historical research,and then explores the reasons for their secularization according to their new social connotations.The author finds out the new social connotations of the names of twelve apostles by historical research and dictionaries,and takes 399,627 corpus from 1990to 2017 selected in the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA for short)for reference,after listing the parts of speech,social connotations,emotional colors and regular collocations finds that:(1)In the parts of speech,there are five names with only part-of-speech of noun;there are four names with part-of-speech of both noun and verb and there are three names with part-of-speech of both noun and adjective;(2)In social connotations,except for the same meaning of Matthew and Matthia,the social connotations of the other names are not the same;(3)Emotionally,there are four names that contain positive emotions;two names have negative emotions and six names are neutral words;(4)In regular collocations,except Matthew,Matthias and Thaddeus,others have regular collocations.In addition,after tracing the etymology and history of each name,the decisive driving force of the secularization of twelve names mainly comes from the following historical periods:(1)The Norman Conquest;(2)The Hundred Years'War;(3)The Renaissance;(4)The Enlightenment;(5)The American Revolutionary War;(6)The American Civil War.