STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF ADDRESS AS A COMPONENT OF INDIRECT SPEECH (BASED ON THE MATERIAL OF ORTHODOX PRAYERS)

Abstract

One of the common and sacred genres of the confessional style is prayer as a way of uniting man with God in order to thank, ask, accept, repent, and so on. Linguistic features of prayers, both those that are a direct expression of religious style and those that function in the structure of literary texts, at different times became the object of study for many scientists, but the structure of addresses in prayers was not studied, what determined the relevance of the topic of the article. The purpose of the study is to analyze the structure of addresses as an integral part of prayers that represents an indirect speech in the confessional style. Realization of the set purpose provides for enforcement of such tasks: 1) to characterize the basic aspects of the functioning of confessional style, to define a place of prayer as a genre in it; 2) to describe the structure of addresses, which are separated from prayers, in order to determine the most productive constructions. From our point of view, the most significant feature of indirect speech is the presence of addresses, because in prayers stylistic and expressive possibilities of vocatives are manifested in a special way. Firstly, speakers with a particular problem ask God, the Virgin, angels, saints, etc, who can help them. Moreover, they address repeatedly, often using synonyms or variant names. Secondly, such addresses are codified, and commonplace, because prayers provide for the use of standard texts that believers must remember. Thirdly, the subjects of addressing constructions very often have additional means of dissemination, including literal meanings, homogeneous Apposition, separate members of a sentence, and even predicative units, which are rarely recorded in other speech patterns. It is on this basis that all addresses recorded by us in Orthodox prayers are classified into three groups: 1) simple or unextended (36.12 %: nouns, substantivized adjectives, and Participle that mostly have religious character); 2) extended uncomplicated or two-component (21.81 %: mostly models «adjective + noun», «noun + adjective», «noun + noun» and «noun + pronoun» and «noun + pronoun», the components of which often are also sacred); 3) extended complicated or multicomponent (42.07 %). There are several ways to complicate vocative phrases: to add apposition to the addresses, to use homogeneous addresses, and as a means of complicating – dependent homogeneous members of the sentence (mostly Attributes), separate members of the sentence, tautological expressions, and more. One of the characteristic features of prayers is the presence of addresses complicated by sentences, and also complex syntactic constructions).