Naming and appellative nature of group vocatives in the Russian language

Abstract

The article examines Russian group vocatives, i. e., units that are used in the sphere of collective direct address and combine the functions of naming a group (plural) addressee and appealing to them. The relevance of the study is determined by the need for a systematic description of the mechanisms of speech effect on a collective addressee. Another reason is the lack of research into group vocatives from the perspective of the dichotomy between "naming/appellativity". The article aims to analyse the naming and appellative nature of group vocatives as well as the mechanisms of their interaction, to consider transitional phenomena, and describe the group vocative types in accordance with the selected classification parameter. The research material included contexts of group vocatives extracted from the Russian National Corpus and texts from political, religious, digital, and everyday discourse. The study utilised descriptivemethods, contextual, componential, and discourse analysis. Depending on the dominant function, group vocatives can be divided into two types. These are naming vocatives (noun phrases identifying the addressee by various characteristic features) and appellative vocatives (interjections, imperatives, ritualised formulae aimed at group mobilisation). The study identified the specific discursive features in the implementation of these functions associated with particular means of expression. Thus, in digital discourse, naming and appealing can be realised through capitalisation, graphic and technical markers. In religious discourse the functions are performed using ritualised dialogic unities; in political discourse naming and appealing occur through ideologically charged names and rhetorical questions. Naming units were shown to be able to vary the degree of finiteness and distinctness of the group addressee from indefinite to specific, whereas appellatives more often denote abstract or implicitly specified addressees. The paper describes transitional phenomena in which naming units acquire appellative potential whilst appellatives perform the naming function. Moreover, the role of syntagmatics (the segmental structure of the core and its modifiers) as an indicator of the dominant function is established.