The role of grammatical parallelism in text construction of Old Russian oratorical prose

Abstract

   The article considers the role of grammatical parallelism in text organization. Grammatical parallelism is defined as a technique that formalizes the structural and semantic correlation of constructions, implemented through the unity of grammatical forms and syntactic functions of related units and supported by repetitions of various linguistic units. For the analysis, we used the texts of Old Russian oratorical prose of the 11^th – 16^th centuries. At the level of organization of syntactic structures, we identified the following ways of including grammatical parallelism in the space of the text: the construction of homogeneous members of a sentence, the chain of predicative units (a period), the complex syntactic whole and the text as a whole. At the level of organization of text composition, we determined the role that the use of grammatical parallelism plays in the design of word series. Words, falling into similar positions of constructions, form a chain of linguistic units that allows the author of the text to express his/her thoughts, expand the ideological and thematic space of the text, and allows the reader to correctly understand the author’s standpoint. The uniformity of adjacent structures, on the one hand, simplifies the construction of the text; on the other hand, it enhances emotionality and allows you to influence the reader or listener. The possibilities of grammatical parallelism in text organization are shown based on various monuments of Old Russian oratorical prose.