SPEECH-ACT VERB PERFORMATIVITY IN RUSSIAN SPELLS
Performative utterances have been repeatedly studied from different points of view in linguistics (not to mention sociological, philosophical and other aspects). The main vector of modern performative studies is the description of their functions in various types of speech acts. This paper identifies semantic features of canonical performative verbs in Russian spells. For us, the performative verb is the core of the performative utterance, however, a clear distinction is made between the explicit performative (the verb of the speech act in the form of the first person singular of the present tense of the active indicative) and other ways of implementing performativity. We have analyzed explicit performatives with the meaning of speech act, described their semantic structure, presuppositions and functions in spell-incantation texts. We have built a performative classification, based on the textual material, and found that in spells, speech-act performative verbs are divided into four groups (according to their semantic features), naming different speech acts and having different illocutionary forces. When analyzing the semantic-presuppositional structure of speech-act performative verbs, we made observations concerning the specifics of spell-incantation performatives in comparison with the same performatives in ordinary speech.