Subject of interpretation in a mythological text

Abstract

The article examines elements of Slavic mythological texts that have an interpretative function. The main focus is on the person who provides the interpretation, and on the nature and methods of its presentation in the text, and on the correlation with functions of the narrator. In the oral folk culture despite the frequency and significance of textual elements in which traditional cultural information from the sphere of popular hermeneutics is explicated, they did not become a subject of the separate folkloristic or linguistic study. The question of the subject of interpretation in the texts of the East Slavic mythological prose was not raised by any of the researchers. An application of a narratological approach to the material made it possible to establish that in oral mythological tales the figure features for the interpreter-narrator are determined by the peculiarities of the communicative situation of the text existence. In particular, the functioning of the mythological text in the pertinent colloquial-speech discourse has determined the dominant role of the narrator as a subject of interpretations. The article reveals a correlation between interpretation forms (explicit and implicit) and the narrators’ position, namely the degree of his proximity to the text event. In addition, the article describes ways of implicit interpretation of mythological situation in the text related to the genre pragmatics.