Text-forming Function of the Author’s Modality in the “Teaching of St. Serapion”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24412/1811-1629-2021-3-59-66Abstract
The article applies an anthropocentric approach in linguistics to analyze the category of the author's modality in the Old Russian literary work “The Teachings of St. Serapion”, which belongs to the genre of oratorical prose. Serapion was a prominent religious figure, a bishop in the city of Vladimir in the 13th century. The purpose of the article is to consider the content plan of the author's modality in the specified manuscript and the linguistic means of its expression. A number of tasks are solved in the article to achieve this purpose. Firstly, it is a discussion of the controversial points in understanding of the category of author's modality, which is defined as a text-forming category. Secondly, substantiating the difference in the content of the terms “author's modality” and “author’s image”. Thirdly, determining the connection of the author's modality with the texts’ genre specifics, which is also can be found on the ancient stage of the existence of the Russian language. Finally, justifying the use of the term “oratorical prose” and characterization of the content plan of the author's modality in “The Teachings”. Serapion’s patriotism and feelings about the fate of his Motherland during the Tatar-Mongol invasion and the feudal fragmentation of Russia, as well as the author's loyalty to Christian ideals are the ideological core of this work. The linguistic means of expressing author's modality are established with the help of the method of contextual and functional-semantic analysis. Such linguistic means consist of modal-evaluative vocabulary, that characterizes the consciousness of a religious person of the Middle Ages, as well as syntactic structures that include complex sentences with the meaning of conditions and elements of expressive syntax, such as rhetorical questions and exclamations, which are used together in order to reveal the author’s personality and oratorical skills.
Keywords:
author’s modality, text modality, the Old Russian literary works, the Old Russian genres, oratorical prose, Serapion Vladimirsky
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Articles of "The World of Russian Word" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.