SVEDECTVO AKO ŽÁNER NÁBOŽENSKEJ KOMUNIKÁCIE

Testimony belongs to very expansive communiqué of present religious communication. From a theological point of view it is an important “tool” and means of a (new) evangelization; linguistically there is reflected little, in Slovak linguistics actually not at all. This study introduces the origins of the issues of testimony as a genre of religious communication. We try to create a definition of testimony and its genre-defining parameters with a focus on some of them – language form, language code and status of an expedient and a percipient. It was shown that the testimony is very eclectic genre, especially in terms of language form and in terms of used language code. This fact indicates the promising research perspective, in which can be applied approaches and methods of stylistics, text linguistics, sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics and also pragma-linguistics.