Names of new saints of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic church and commemorative discourse

Abstract

The article discusses the names of new saints of the UGCC (hagioanthroponyms) as markers of the collective memory of modern society regarding the events of the past, namely the rejection of Russian (in the 19th century) and Soviet (in the 20th century) ideologies in the religious life of Ukrainian Greek Catholics. From the theoretical perspective, the analysis is premised on the ideas and provisions of onomastics regarding the semiotic nature of proper names and their functions of accumulation and translation of the religious sphere, of sociolinguistics regarding the interaction of language and the Church, as well as lexicology regarding the systematisation of units into thematic groups. The papers on religious studies, the history of the Church, the history of totalitarianism in the USSR and the historical memory of socio-cultural knowledge provided the context for the transformation of one of the spheres of collective memory into the linguistic categories of «hagioanthroponyms», «nominative productivity» and «thematic group». The sources of the analysis included the texts of religious and secular discourse, thematically related to the life and activities of the martyrs for the Faith, and the works of the event participants. The units of analysis, namely hagioanthroponyms, have denotations of the divine-spiritual sphere as the object of nomination. The research of the problem was provided by applied correlative and biographical methods, the method of sociolinguistic interpretation, and elements of discourse analysis. They helped to follow the process of creating nominations derived from hagioanthroponyms in modern religious and secular discourse and to determine that they contain formal and substantive components of knowledge about the past. Derivative units create thematic groups «names of prayers», «names of Akathist’s», «names of icons and other sacred images», «names of sacred places of prayer», «names of educational institutions», «names of films» and related to information about the forced conversion to Orthodoxy of Ukrainian Greek Catholics in the Russian Empire and the USSR. The analysis results are relevant for onomastics, sociolinguistics, lexicology and stylistics.