TEXT-DISCOURSE SPACE OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE STATE ANTHEM IN THE FUNCTIONAL-PRAGMATIC FRAMEWORK

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of cognitive-communicative parameters of English-language texts of the discursive genre “anthem”. The English-language national anthem appears in the imagination of contemporaries as a solemn song about the homeland, its heroic past, happy present and bright future. Being a versed literary and artistic text, it is intended for choral performance during various official events and is perceived by the target audience not only as one of the symbols of the state, but also as an integral component of its social and political life. In the proposed work, the linguistic analysis of the mentioned anthems is based on an aspect-by-aspect consideration of their main characteristics in functionalpragmatic dimensions, with a focus on supercategories of predicativeness and on the theory of speech acts. The texts of the English-language national anthems are analyzed from the point of view of their intentional content, as well as the ways and means of the suggestive influence of discourse agents on their clients. The predicative network of English state anthems is determined by the interaction of three communicatively significant subcategories – temporality, personality, modality of communication. It is proved that the temporal pattern of the texts of English-language national anthems is determined by the predominant use of only two tense forms (Present Simple and Future Simple) with a significant advantage of the former. Other tense forms are either missing or not statistically relevant. The personality of these texts is realized through dialogue and monologue with the absolute predominance of the former, while the movement of speech signals occurs in only one direction – from the agent of discourse to the client without the latter’s responsive lines. The category of modality also behaves selectively, which gives absolute preference to the means of its internal realization (indicative, imperative), and among its external means sparingly uses only two modal verbs – “may” and “shall”. It has been found that the pragmatic-semantic organization of the texts of English-language national anthems is outlined by multidirectional illocutionary vectors. The most common way of implementing the pragmatic instructions of the clients of the discourse here is the ascertaining narration. At the same time, neither the directives nor the promissives, with their intrusive directness, but rather the constatives, with their unobtrusive intentional format, are able to clearly convey to the clients of the discourse the leading national idea, capable of uniting the nation into some strong and indivisible entity, in which they will rule unshakable moral values.