Pragmatic organization of medical spells in the English and French languages

Abstract

The article presents communicative and pragmatic models of implementation of the concept disease in the medical incantation. Linguopragmatics as a field of modern linguistics is certainly one of the closest to cultural studies, and to some extent even overlaps in its content with it and studies the language in its real, situational, personal, localized time and space functioning, in the context of behavior, communication of its subjects, addressees, content, goals, etc. It has been proved that sacred texts, which include incantation, are largely “communicative”. In such texts there is a clearly expressed goal (to exile, frighten or wheedle the disease, to transfer it from the patient to the tree, to the subject, etc.) and a very specific addressee (this may be the disease itself, the sick, the demon, the saint, the go-between, God, etc.). They usually contain clear pragmatic organization, correlation with a certain situation – indications on the transmitter, the addressee, the illocutionary purpose (vocatives, pronouns of 1 and 2 persons, imperatives, optative formulas), and their general ritual semantics is determined by the primary (internal) pragmatic guideline. It can be argued that the addresser of medical incantation is a versatile phenomenon, both in terms of pragmatic models and functions, and the ethnic and social peculiarity prevailing over these functions. Most often the role of the addresser acts as a person who heals applying magic formulas that are additional or primary in the medical practice. Sometimes the addresser is the patient himself. There are three types of addressees in all studied languages: 1) about direct addressee of the ceremonial situation, that is, about one of the participants of the ritual to which the text is referred (for example, the patient in the ritual of treatment), 2) about the addressee marked and named in the text (it might not be only a real ceremonial person, but also God, a holy, personified holiday, demonological character, object, object or instrument of action), 3) about some absolute addressee, the higher power to which ultimately appeals any ritual text of any incantation.