Emotivity and Appellative Means in Homiletical Texts by Gregory the Great: A Three-tiered Historical Comparison between Latin, Church Slavonic and Modern Czech.

This article examines the use of emotive and appellative linguistic strategies expressing deontic modality—specifically obligation and permission—in Gregory the Great's 6th-century Latin homilies on the gospels and their translations into 11th-century Church Slavonic and 20th-century Modern Czech. Focusing on Latin gerundives with deontic meaning and the verb debere ("to owe, must"), the study compares their semantic and pragmatic functions across these languages, highlighting a distinction between situational necessity (gerundives) and moral obligation (debemus). The Church Slavonic translations employ a dative-infinitive construction to render Latin gerundives, maintaining this distinction and creating more indirect, attenuated emotive appeals, while Modern Czech shows greater influence from Germanic modal verbs (e.g., muset "must") alongside impersonal constructions (e.g., je třeba "it is necessary"), reflecting historical language contact and evolving modality systems. The research concludes that these translation strategies effectively preserved the original rhetorical functions across linguistic and temporal boundaries, though Modern Czech exhibits more direct modal expressions due to German influence.