FEATURES OF THE REFLECTION OF THE SOCIAL STATUS OF CORRESPONDENTS IN THE ETIQUETTE FORMULAS OF THE BUSINESS CORRESPONDENCE OF THE HETMAN STATE

Abstract

Introduction. The social status of the communicants plays a major role in the selection of etiquette formulas in a business epistolary text. In the letter dialogue of representatives of class society, the corresponding linguistic phenomena perform the function of a social sign, reflecting the social realities inherent in a certain historical period.
The purpose of the article is to characterize the features of the reflection of the social status of correspondents in the business correspondence of the Ukrainian Hetmanate of the second half of the 17th –middle 18th centuries.
Results. It has been established that the main verbal way of conscious expression of the social status of the communicator is the standard etiquette formulas of the beginning and end of a business letter. The role of status is played by lexemes that determine the place of a person in the social structure (social honorifics, regulatives) or reproduce the hierarchical organization of the military-administrative institutions and religious community of that time (military ranks, administrative positions, church ranks). The considered etiquette formulas were a reflection of the social stratification of society in the second half of the 17th – middle18th centuries. They were formed on the basis of the norms of local customary law, as well as under the direct influence of the clerkship of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Muscovy. The volume of initial vocative constructions, their filling with adjectives-intensifiers directly depended on the social status of the addressee. Thirdly, the studied sources confirm the existence in the business correspondence of the Hetmanate of a status asymmetry between the addressee and the addresser inherited from the previous era, which was manifested in the emphasized exaltation of the former and the self-humiliation of the latter expressed by etiquette formulas. At the same time, it was based not only on class or property inequality, but also on the author's desire to continue communication and achieve the set goal.
Originality. The reflection of the social status of correspondents in the business correspondence of the Hetmanate was studied for the first time.
Conclusions. The peculiarities of the social structure of the Ukrainian Hetmanate in the second half of the 17th – middle 18th centuries determined the functioning of a system of standard etiquette formulas of a business letter, which reflected the social stratification of that time with its vertical hierarchy.