Lexico-Stylistic Means of Creating Images of Galicia and Galicians in «Colloquium of Twenty-Four Rustic Galicians» by Martin Sarmiento

The paper examines the lexical and stylistic means of creating the images of Galicia and the Galicians in the «Colloquium of Twenty-Four Rustic Galicians» by Martin Sarmiento, the Benedictine monk of the Enlightenment era. Created in 1746, the text combines the features of lexicographic description and fiction and is considered the first modern text written entirely in Galician. Methods of linguistic, stylistic and contextual text analysis, as well as descriptive and cultural-historical methods are used in the paper. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time in Russian science, «Colloquium...» becomes the object of philological study. Also, the analysis of the means of creating the image of Galicia fits into the current cultural problems of analyzing the process of formation of the Spanish national character. The study reveals the following characteristics: the image of Galicia contains features that will further form a stereotypical idea of the autonomous community (it is a beautiful traditional agricultural region, rich in natural resources); Galicians, even when living in a foreign land, recognize themselves as a special community, they are deeply embedded in folk culture with its holidays, superstitions and linguistic richness, while tension is felt between them and the rest of the inhabitants of Spain; noble Galicians are practically idealized, while the peasants, despite their harsh assessments, are nice in their own way and have a sense of humor. The following lexical and stylistic means play an important role in the text: Galician realia (both well-known and rare lexemes); homogeneous parts of the sentence combining words according to semantic fields; comparison, wordplay, irony, vulgarization of images.

Galicia, Galician language, Martin Sarmiento, Galician literature, semantic field, culture-specific item, superstition, wordplay, irony, vulgarization of images