Предостережения и запреты как способ воздействия на адресата в украинских проповедях XVII–XVIIІ вв.
Warnings and Prohibitions as Means of Exerting Influence on the Addressee in Seventeenth– Eighteenth-Century Ukrainian Sermons

Summary/Abstract: In religious communication, psychological influence – as a result of which a person should change their subjective features (value orientations, ways of conduct, etc.) – is aimed at fostering compliance with religious norms. The tasks of a priest include religious education and correcting people’s behaviour, warning them against acts which contradict Christian values, in other words: preventing people from committing sins. This task is best achieved by means of verbal persuasion used in sermons. This paper offers a diachronic analysis of speech acts of warning and prohibition (preventives and prohibitives) on the basis of written monuments of the Ukrainian language: Ukrainian sermons from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the analysed sermons, they are used in order to achieve the aim of preventing sinful conduct. They refer both to everyday situations and to moral attitudes in general. In the texts under consideration, the semantics of warning and prohibition is conveyed using means of expression from different levels. At the lexical level, they are verbs with the general meaning ‘to warn’, ‘to be afraid’, and verbs of action creating a distance between the individual and sinful feelings, thoughts and actions: ‘to escape’, ‘to reject’. Words and phrases denoting cognitive processes play the role of discourse markers: ‘to know’, ‘to be aware of’, ‘to remind’. The speech acts of warning and prohibition are most frequently expressed with verbs in the form of negative imperative. One specific aspect of the use of preventives is that they are supplemented with recommendations which the addressee may accept of his/her own will. The preacher uses various rhetorical strategies to enhance the convincing function of warnings, such as references to widely known cases from the past (precedential phenomena), quotations from the Holy Scripture, and preventive exhortations. In order to better convince the congregation and urge them to follow the model of proper conduct, the preacher uses various means of expression: epithets conveying negative valuation, and stylistic figures: amplification, gradation, pairs of synonyms. The material under consideration makes it possible to conclude that the Ukrainian language of the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries had a considerable potential in terms of verbal persuasion, and opens prospects for the study of its dynamics.

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