Pragmatics of Church Slavonic Language’s Pronouns in Standard Russian


2021. № 6, 98-111

Elena E. Seregina1, Olga A. Matveeva2, Saint Tikhon’s Humanitarian Orthodox University (Russia, Moscow), anel1974@bk.ru1, kogda_net_ryadom@mail.ru2

Abstract:

Church Slavonic language had a signifi cant infl uence on the formation of the Russian literary language. In the oldest monuments of East Slavic writing and in modern texts, various elements of the Church Slavonic language’s system are presented: vocabulary, individual grammatical forms and syntactic constructions. Connotative Slavonicisms were used to create a high-fl own style, convey historical color, to express civic ideas, they also served as a means of parody, irony and expression. This article contains information about the pragmatic potential of some word forms of personal pronouns borrowed from the Church Slavonic language: fi rst-person, secondperson and the refl exive pronoun. These pronouns have а special literary connotation, so their use is always stylistically motivated. The article uses materials from the National Corpus of the Russian language (historical, newspaper, oral) covering the period from the XII century to the present.  The paper also contains information about homonymy of these forms (typical for spontaneous speech), and of the ancient enclitics. When analyzing examples with archaic pronouns, close attention is paid to the contextual environment of word forms and Church Slavonic structures.

For citation:

Seregina E. E., Matveeva O. A. Pragmatics of Church Slavonic Language’s Pronouns in Standard Russian. Russian Speech = Russkaya Rech’.
2021. No. 6. Pp. 98–111. DOI: 10.31857/S013161170017982-9.