Обещание жениться как часть национального лингвокультурного пространства (на примере русскоязычного и испаноязычного юридического, медийного, литературного дискурсов)

The aim of the article is to conduct, for the first time in Spanish studies, a contrastive analysis of the verbalization of the engagement ritual and the consequences of its dissolution in Russian, Spanish and some Latin American cultures through the prism of discursive contexts (legal, media and literary). The study of mutual correspondences and differences of the betrothal ritual as a socially oriented model of behaviour verbally recorded in legal documents, literary works and media texts reveals the universality and at the same time national specificity of traditions of peoples of different countries, manifested in discourse as an integrative field of knowledge.The promise to marry as a message about the obligation to marry and the promise as a performative speech act have linguocultural specificity, which is determined, among others, by communicative, factual and eventual, legal and value dominants, reflecting the national-linguistic picture of the world and cognitive representations of the people. The study of the main characteristics of the engagement ritual verbalized in different types of discourse and of the communicative act of promising to marry is performed in the context of discourse hermeneutics – a perspective branch of modern discoursology, which considers cultural-historical, social, philosophical, mental and linguistic characteristics when interpreting communicative units representing concepts and cultural phenomena.The authors have established dictionary meanings and peculiarities of the use of lexemes related to engagement, their similarities and differences in Russian- and Spanish-speaking cultural, linguistic and discursive environment. The review of legal regulation of engagement in Roman law, in the law of Russia, Spain, a number of countries of Latin America is carried out in order to reveal the national-cultural identity of the ritual, verbalized in the speech act of promise, and to find out the consequences of its non-fulfilment. The promise to marry in legal discourse is analysed from the position of speech act theory and the hypothesis that the speech acts performed during the engagement have the properties of performativity in those countries where the engagement retains legal consequences is confirmed. The moral and ethical meaning of the promise to marry and its non-fulfilment is also illustrated on the example of literary works.