Lexical and Grammatical Representation of Addressing as a Genre-Forming Feature of the Russian Vernacular Romance

Resumen

It has been determined that addressing is an important genre-forming feature of the Russian vernacular romance, and that there is a fairly wide range of methods of its linguistic representation which can be used by the speaker to indicate the addressee of the utterance, to address an imaginary interlocutor. These are grammatical – in particular morphological features (including nouns, adjectives, personal and possessive pronouns) and syntactic features (grammatical first person of verbs and personal pronouns, one-member sentences of a certain type, addresses, etc.) – as well as lexical (fixed definitions, various nominations, etc.), and textual means (expanded contexts).
Thanks to the means of addressing chosen by the author, the addressee in the Russian romance becomes an extremely significant participant in the situation of dialogical personal interaction that is implicit in reality but explicit through linguistic means of addressing.
The results of the study can be used to solve the current problem of defining the Russian romance as a genre, defining its genre features. For example, it was determined that an appeal to the subject of feelings is an obligatory romance genre feature forming its dialogicity, which is confirmed by the discovered and described variants of the grammatical representation of characters in texts related to the genre of the Russian vernacular romance.
It was revealed that the frequency of using certain words can serve as an important speech-genre characteristic of the vernacular romance. Computer programs were used as a tool for creating a frequency word list, which allowed performing part-of-speech tagging, bringing grammatical forms of frequent words to the initial form and distributing lemmas by frequency of occurrence. A list of the most frequent lemmas as well as the quantities of these words in the texts of Russian vernacular romances are presented, with the indicators of addressing being at the top of the list.
A frequency list of addresses used in Russian romances is also presented. The analysis showed that the address “милый друг” (“dear friend”) displays the “rhetorical ideal” in the romance text simultaneously reflecting the normative ethical ideas about the object of addressing which are determined by the impossibility of open, direct recognition of one’s feelings.
A significant indicator of addressing in the Russian romance is the wide use of imperatives; various variants of their lexical and grammatical representation are considered.
The genre-forming features of the Russian vernacular romance in terms of addressing are the fundamental orientation of the lyrical hero towards dialogicity, the possibility of implicit and explicit representation of the addressee, the significant absence of the addresser / addressee of the address (hidden addressing), as well as the fusion of the lyrical hero with the object of his or her affections.