Abstract:

This paper reports the findings of research into select linguistic resources construing what has been called the ‘social gospel’ of Martin Luther King Jr. (henceforth MLK): i.e., the secularized ‘here and now’ face of the typically other-worldly religious message of deliverance. For this purpose, the environment of the node word free* is investigated in 2 small, specially created, diachronic corpora of, firstly, his speeches (MLK1) and, for comparative purposes, his sermons (MLK2).

Author: Donna R. Miller, Monica Turci