Poetics and pragmatics of mythological genre texts

Based on a linguistic interpretation of the mechanisms of autobiographical and collective memory, the concept of retrospective discourse is formulated. There are many types of discourse in the total discursive space, combining texts of various genres and different functional and stylistic affiliation. One of these synthetic types is the retrospective discourse that we identified in the course of our research, by which we mean the type of mental-cognitive and communicative-pragmatic activity of a speech subject that is actualized in genredetermined types of text in which reconstructed facts and events from personal or someone else's past experience are recorded. Within this type of discourse, the existence of two main subtypes is established, shaped by the specifics of the subject’s mental and cognitive activity. Texts of the mythological genre are considered a constant component of the collectively determined subtype of retrospective discourse. The study examines the relationship between fictional and non-fictional elements in German-language legends contained in the Brothers Grimm’s collection Deutsche Sagen. The paper systematizes and classifies the ways in wich the pragmatic aspect of the analysed texts is explicated at lexical and grammatical levels.