VOCATIVE EXPRESSIONS IN THE SERVICE TO SAINTS ATHANASIUS AND CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA (18TH CENTURY)

Abstract

This paper discusses vocative expressions and their pragmatic functions in poetic liturgical texts, more specifically, in The Service to Saints Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, an early 18th-century Serbo-Slavonic manuscript kept at the Museum of the Old Orthodox Christian Church in Sarajevo. A service is a complex poetic genre used in liturgy that often contains vocative expressions, which may be single lexemes or syntagms, whose structure may have different patterns. The monolexical vocative expressions in The Service include anthroponyms, nouns, substantivised adjectives and collective nouns. The multilexical vocatives consist of two or more elements and include nouns and participles, as well as optional or dependent elements, such as agreeing and non-agreeing attributes, attributive nouns, and appositives. The manuscript analysis showed a great syntactic variety of the multilexical vocative expressions with dependent elements, which rarely re-occur, with the resulting language being unformulaic and unrepetitive. The meaning of the vocative expressions is not limited to the primary functions of address and call; in addition to the vocative and appellative functions, the vocatives are also expressive or offer prayers to the saints and solemnise them.