Representation of mystical reality in the mythological narrative

Abstract

The article is devoted to the category of reality in the communicative behaviour of the narrator in the mythological narrative. The problem is investigated on the material of more than 800 texts of mythological stories from the collection of the folklore and ethnographic archive of Pskov State University. Two levels of indicators were identified by a continuous sampling of narrative means of representing reality. The dominant marker of the zone of reality of the first level was the word truth with its lexico-semantic, modal and syntactic intensifiers, which create a semantic context for the nuclear name. The second level of indicators of event reality is expressed by means of assurance formulas: honestly, by God, and the use of alternative type phrases: (either) true or false, (either) truth or not. The “zero” indicator of the reality of an irrational event in the narrator’s discourse can be explained both by the emotional and psychological mood of the narrator and by the communicative behaviour of the listener (collector of folklore). Conclusions on the dominance of lexemes as representatives of the zone of reality have been verified using electronic means.