Authors

Discussion

Transcendental Speech Acts include among their felicity conditions a transcendental instance which guarantees the validity of the mostly commissive or assertive illocutions. There is an ongoing debate, as to what degree the analysis of transcendental speech acts can be used to reconstruct cultural norms and everyday religious belief. Based on Indo-European or Proto-Slavic material the reconstruction of a proto-culture is mainly restricted to considering the etymology of lexical elements and morphological derivations; a text like the Kyivan Primary Chronicle allows to consider the nature of transcendental speech acts within concrete pragmatic circumstances. The paper will focus on two lexical elements ("to take an oath", "to bless") within various narrative contexts. It will be seen that the felicity conditions for both speech acts can be taken as indicators for the dynamics of an evolving religious culture.