Semantics of the regulative maty (mother) in Andrei Sheptytsky’s epistles

Abstract

The article highlights the issue of the lexical regulative maty semantics in the epistles of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. Since the case study material is the religious style texts, the lexeme under consideration, in addition to its basic meaning of „woman, in relation to the child she gave birth to”, expands its semantics with the meaning of „church, in relation to its believers” with its concretization through the adjective lexemes native, genuine. The frequency actualization of the regulative maty (mother) has been revealed in the names of the religious discourse Mother of God, God’s Mother, Mother of Christ, Holy Mother, Blessed Mother, used to denote the motherhood of the Virgin Mary in relation to Jesus Christ, and in the nomens the Mother of us all, the Mother of Heaven, used for the explication of her motherhood significance to all the faithful on the Earth. The secular meaning of the lexical regulative mother is determined by the style of woman’s behavior as a Christian and indicated, primarily, by the attributes of pious, Christian, native mother (a family status in relation to children). The Metropolitan’s idiostyle illustrates the use of the studied regulative in a clear family hierarchy, for example father and mother; father, mother, brother, sister, wife, husband; mother and a child, including a generalized collective image of all women, whose primary mission is the birth and upbringing of children.