Linguo-Cognitive Level of a Clergyman’s Linguistic Personality (Based on the Autobiographical Memoirs of Archpriest Alexy Rezukhin)

Abstract

Modern linguistics is quite anthropocentric, that is why the author and the protagonist of an autobiographical work become the objects of many studies, but documentary prose about provincial life written by contemporary spiritual leaders is undeservedly deprived of such attention. The main purpose of this paper is to identify the peculiarities of the thesaurus level of a clergyman’s linguistic personality in the texts of autobiographical memoirs dated to the end of the 20th century. The source of empirical material for the research is the only text written by the direct participant of the events that took place in Vologda in the 30-40s of the XXth century and is referred to by researchers who study the life of the Russian Church. The thesaurus of a linguistic personality helps a researcher, even without having an idea about a particular person, to build a number of linguistic hypotheses and draw conclusions about the person’s cultural, religious, and professional identity. Certain lexical units distinguish the speech of representatives of particular professions from others. The author classifies lexical, syntactic, and idiomatic structures in order to describe the features of the vocabulary. The paper attracts attention to the use of special speech constructions, lexical units, in particular, sublime/outdated vocabulary in the speech of people who have received religious education. Thus, speech expressiveness, combined with church terminology, forms a speech portrait of a clergyman’s linguistic personality.

Keywords

• autobiographical memoirs
• linguistic personality of a clergyman
• linguo-cognitive level of a linguistic personality
• lexical units
• syntactic structures
• sublime vocabulary
• author’s discourse
• thesaurus