EXCLUSIVE AND INCLUSIVE WE-GROUPS IN THE LESYA UKRAINKA’S DRAMA “BOYARYNIA”: INFORMATIONAL ASPECT

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of some fragments from Lesya Ukrainka’s drama “Boyarynia”, in which the author uses the pronoun WE. The reference of this pronoun is generally determined by the context of the work or the communication situation. In addition to the speaker himself, WE can indicate either the addressee of the message (these are the so-called inclusive reference groups), or some other person or people who do not participate in the communication (these are the exclusive reference groups). To interpret the use of the pronoun WE, the reader of the work needs to involve both linguistic and extralinguistic information. First, the reader must have knowledge about the meaning of the linguistic units used in the text, as well as possess the conceptual information that these units denote; secondly, the reader needs to have a sufficient level of background information about the world, including ethnically marked information; thirdly, the reader must have speech competence and knowledge about the specifics of communicative behavior in various communication situations. Applying his knowledge, the reader can not only determine what type of WE-group the author of the work built, but also accurately or probabilistically outline the content of an exclusive WE-group. Since inclusive WE-groups include the speech addressee himself, such groups are rarely used in the context of real modality; they are characterized by contexts of unreal modality or future tense. The reader needs less effort to interpret inclusive WE groups than to understand the content of exclusive WE groups. It is important that the informativeness of exclusive WE-groups turns out to be significant. There are three inclusive and eight exclusive WE-groups in the seven considered fragments of the drama “Boyarynia”. Lesya Ukrainka builds exclusive WE-groups with different references: in some groups she includes specific characters from the drama, and in some WE-groups she unites a significant number of undefined persons with whom the character identifies himself according to certain parameters.