“Obvious - incredible”. Methods of describing of a mystical situation in mythological narratives

Abstract

The article discusses the features of the image feature of the situation when a person contacts a mythological character or a phenomenon in oral mythological stories from the point of view of the speaker’s assessing the situation by the reliability degree. The study was conducted by the method of semantic and contextual analysis of perceptual vocabulary and verbal units expressing an assessment of reliability of the message. A comparative analysis was also used for the vocabulary of the fairy tales as texts of another modality. The study showed that the message of a mystical event in mythological narratives is especially marked, because it is an event the very reality of which can be questioned and which, therefore, is perceived as incredible. In mythological prose, unlike a fairy tale, the means of expressing an assessment of the reliability degree are very frequent, and the frequency of those words is much higher than in the general language. In mythological narratives, the values of both ends of the reliability scale are presented with all types of expressions for the speaker assessing his state of knowledge of the world, described in linguistics (situations of simple, categorical and problematic reliability).