ФУНКЦІЙНИЙ ПОТЕНЦІАЛ ІМПЕРАТИВА У ВИСЛОВЛЕННЯХ РЕЛІГІЙНОЇ СЕМАНТИКИ (на матеріалі творів Г. Ф. Квітки-Основ'яненка)

The proposed article deals with the issue of the specific language of religious semantics as unique products of the thinking and speech activity of Ukrainians in view of the nature of their spiritual worldview. The relevance of the study is caused by necessity to follow up the realization of the peculiarities of Ukrainian’s appeals to God. The main task of the article is the analysis of the actual material, collected by the method of a complete sample from the works of H. F. Kvitka-Osnovianenko. The purpose of the proposed study is to reveal the specifics of the linguistic design of appeals of Ukrainians to God. It is indicated on the specifies the structural features of sentences that can express appeal to God, their functional-semantic peculiarity. An attempt to determine the functionality of the predicate-imperative as a center-forming element, including the transformed phraseologized sentences-interjections, was made. The examples of man’s conversion to God are statements presented in the form of imperative sentences with a clearly defined constituent in the form of an imperative (at the grammatical level). The imperative is quite suitable for the expression of various functional-semantic types of appeal to God. The vocative together with the predicate-imperative are the semantic-grammatical center of imperative religious sentences-statements. The ability of the imperative-vocative combination to transform into exclamatory sentence-phraseological units allows us to ascertain the functional potential of imperatives in the statements of religious semantics.