THE SYSTEM OF THE SACRED PERFOMATIVES AND ITS ROLEIN THE ROMAN CULTURE AND LIFE IN I B.C. - I A.D.

The observed paper is a part of the researchdesigned as an introduction to the interdisciplinary sphere of scientific knowledge remainingstill unexplored which we propose to name History of performativity. The main aim of this article isto show on the concrete historical material how the faculty of language to be an equivalent of the actionwas realized, used, and expressed in the Ancient Rome on the verge of the two eras. The authornot only offers a pragmatic and semantic analysis of the sacred perfomatives system, but also enucleatestrends determining the considered system in that epoch.Having described changes in attitude of the Roman society towards the sacred perfomatives theauthor concludes that amplifying of the personal responsibility principle in the Roman mentality conducedto separation of the private communicative actions from the state significant ones. Owing to thatprocess the private acts were withdrawn from the sphere of legal amenability. However, according tosecularization of the society, transgressions connected with those actions in private life became lookedupon in a moral - not in a religious, as earlier - dimension. Thus they were going back to judgment ofthe society and the state, the source and the guard of morality.The presented analysis of the sacred perfomatives includes most active and important for that culturegenres: the vow, the oath, the devotion, and the malediction. It is argued the main specific featureof these forms is a characteristic system of illocutions closely connected with each other. For that reasonthe speech genres embodying them constellate integrative pragmatic complex in which all componentsdepend on each other.In the number of those illocutions the author distinguishes the directive expressed in the speech in director indirect ways. It was presented directly in the specific Roman vow (Do p2!), indirectly - in a classicalvariant of that genre (If you (god) do p1…). In the first case the straight directive was generally added withthe informative (I have done / am doing / do p1…), in the second - with the comissive (I promise to dop2 for you). The author finds an analogical intentional structure in the Roman oath typical for that period.The impersonal directive (Let p2 happen with me!..) interacts with the indirectly expressed comissive (…if I do not do p1) or with the informative (… if I am not doing / do p1).In the conclusion it is inferred that every cultural epoch creates its own communicative reality,uniqueness of which appears in specifics of spheres and techniques of communication as well as in away of perception and comprehension of the language essence itself. And we can near to an adequateunderstanding of this reality and its mental representation in peoples mind influenced with the realspeech experience - we can do it only under condition that these phenomena are considered as elementsof the whole world-picture.

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