РУССКИЕ ЛИТАНИИ: РАЗНОВИДНОСТИ И ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ ЖАНРА
RUSSIAN LITANIES: TYPES AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GENRE

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to distinguish linguistic and prag¬malinguistic characteristics of the Russian speech genre of litany which was first described by the American sociologist and anthropologist Rice. The paper focuses on illocutionary properties of litany and aims at identifying the basic pragmatic types of the speech genre in Russian fiction and memoirs. Taking into account illocutionary criteria, four main types of the genre were distinguished: a litany-complaint (prototypical type of litany which is based on the idea that speakers give an account of their misfortunes and expect sympathy and un¬derstanding of the addressee); a litany-self-justifi¬cation (it is realized in the situations when speakers misbehave, and wishing to reduce their guilt, they refer to objective external factors which supposedly influenced their behaviour); a litany-accusation (it is realized when the addressee is guilty of the speakers’ misfortunes at least partly, and it gives a possibility for the speaker to combine complaints with different types of accusations ranging from reproaches to imprecations); and litany-bragging (it combines both complaints about life and realization of positive strategy of self-presentation). Apart from that, the article embraces such features of litanies as relative contextual autonomy (i.e. tenuous connection with the previous context in the discourses of monologue and dialogue), the prevalence of modalities of obligation and necessity (it is demonstrated that deontic and alethic modal meanings prevail in the genre of litany, whereas the alethic modality might be obscured by the speaker and manifest as deontic), specific exploitation of death simulacres as well as basic types of the primary axiological opposition models ‘good-bad’ (it includes such versions as “I/we feel bad – you feel good”, “I/we feel bad – they/others feel good”, “it was good before – now it is bad”). The article concludes that the litany is a communicative phenomenon reflecting cultural aspects and it stresses the necessity of further research into the specifics of the speech genre of litany (or its analogues) in other communicative cultures.

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