Polycoded Aspect of Russian Spoken Charms

Russian spoken charms represent a unique genre of traditional verbal folklore with its own remarkable polycoded structure. The issue belongs to a wide circle of contemporary linguistic problematics, which includes cultural linguistics, multimodal communication, polycoded texts, verbal semiotics, performative language, speech influence, and the discourse vs. text dilemma. The authors applied the method of systemic description to Russian spoken charms to identify and describe their polycoded structure, as well as their lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic verbal code, non-verbal code patterns, and major cultural codes in their interaction. A combination of discursive, semiotic, linguistic, and pragmatic analyses was applied to 1,800 charms from 17th – early 20th centuries. A spoken charm proved to be an integrative system of intertwined verbal formulae, ritual actions, and cultural background. It owed its holistic multimodal effect to the specific features of each code and the mechanisms of their synergy. The polycoded nature of the Russian spoken charm proved to be the key to its adequate interpretation.