The role of voice and diathesis in the creation of narrative structure in the 'Povest' o bojaryne Morozovoj' and two other seventeenth-century Russian narrative texts

This dissertation examines the role of voice and diathesis in the creation of narrative structure in three seventeenth-century Russian narrative texts: Povest' o bojaryne Morozovoj (PBM), Zitie Julianii Lazarevskoj (JL), and Povest' o Savve Grudcyne (SG). The primary analysis focuses on the PBM. A less detailed analysis of JL and SG is provided for comparison. The dissertation provides evidence that, despite the rapidly changing and often confusing linguistic situation that obtains in the seventeenth-century, systematic linguistic means of creating structural coherence in a narrative were available to be exploited in accordance with the communicative goals of the author.;My analysis of the PBM focuses on 350 semantically transitive events in the text. A database was created, specifying the following data: the identity of the participants; the NP type of the participants; the case of each nominal referring to the participants; the voice construction; the status of the clause as episode internal, final or medial; the semantic content of the verb, and the transitivity status of the clause (based on the scalar notion of Transitivity presented by Hopper and Thompson). The results of the data analysis indicate that, in the PBM, voice is used systematically and pragmatically to create narrative structure.;Four related areas of voice and discourse structure are discussed: (1) The use of passive and null-subject third person plural constructions to create a participant hierarchy and an opposition of good vs. evil participants. (2) The status of null-subject third person plural constructions as active or nonactive. (3) The role of the passive in the secondary and peripheral narrative threads. (4) The function of the peripheral narrative threads.;The results of the study show a high correlation between the identity of participants in the narrative and the type of voice construction with which they will be associated. Voice has a related role in establishing the primary, secondary and peripheral narrative threads in the text.