Christian theonyms in Taras Shevchenko’s poetic discourse
Mykola Stepanenko, Doctor of Sciences in Philology, Professor in the Department of Ukrainian Language, Poltava V. H. Korolenko National Pedagogical University
2 Ostrohradsʹkуі St., Poltava 36003, Ukraine
E-mail: myk_ivan@ukr.net
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6727-1265
Language: Ukrainian
Abstract: This study explores the use of the Christian theonym Boh ‘God’ in the poetic discourse of Taras Shevchenko. This lexical unit forms the center of sacredness in Shevchenko’s poetic discourse, with all the other linguistic means of religious mini-texts being directly or indirectly related to it. The careful examination of Shevchenko’s linguistic practice, especially its sacred content, shows that the author was a believer who verbalized knowledge about God from the Holy Scripture in his texts in the form of quotations or plot biblicisms. The research focuses primarily on the typology of the names of different parts of God, e.g., the Divine Trinity, God the Father, and God the Son. To this end, a paradigmatic approach is engaged: the paper compiles the corpus of God’snames, reveals specific features of each actualizing name which performs an important concretizing function from semasiological and stylistic perspective, and determines a set of lexical-semantic representatives of these names. The article establishes syntagmatic and phraseological correlations between the onyms Boh ‘God’ and Hospodʹ ‘Lord’. In his magnum opus Kobzar, Shevchenko uses the lexeme Boh most frequently, and it performs the functions of a subject, object, and addressee demonstrating widesyntagmatic connections and phraseological potential. The paper discusses lexical-semanticcombinability of this lexeme with the attributive modifiers (adjectives, pronoun adjectives) at the level of a word combination and with the semantically multifunctional verbal predicates at the level of a sentence and singles out the semantic types of the phraseological units with the component Boh. The derivatives of the theonym Boh analysed permit inferences about the secondary adjective Božyj ‘God’s’ (from Boh) which functions as a semantic center of both syntactically free phrases and phraseological units represented by the whole range of semantic types.
Keywords: Taras Shevchenko’s poetic discourse, theonym Boh, God’s names, secondary adjective Božyj formed from a noun, nominative paradigm
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