SUMMARY
The article focuses on the rhythmic and syntactic aspect of the narrator’s linguistic representation in the story-ballad "The Proud Couple" by P. Kulish. It is found out that therhythmic and intonational parameters of the text are a clear marker of the individual stylistic originality of the writer in general and his fictional work in particular. They determine the recognizability of the author’s style, form the emotional and evaluative tonality of speech, ensure the unity of form and content. The use of folkloric artistic principles and genre and stylistic means contributed to the fact that the analyzed narrative is written in the form of a folk story and architectonically implements the template of the embedded composition. The content and emotional and evaluative vector of the story is set by the narrator, whose specificity is revealed in the analyzed text in the synthesis of the narrator and the story-teller, which is explicated by the grammatical forms of the 1st and 3rd person singular, from which the whole imaginary world of the story is represented. The text demonstrates a systematically organized rhythmic and intonational system of the message-narration delivered by the folk narrator with all the emotional and evaluative nuances, subjective modality, dialogism, colloquial ornamentation, embodied syntactic means that affect the psychology of readers’ perception. Constructions with imperative and interrogative modality, word order, direct address, parenthetic and inserted components, inseparable structures, complex sentences with expressive colloquial colouring, means ofconveying someone else’s speech, amplification, syntactic parallelism, etc. contribute to the explication of rhythmic and syntactic expressiveness. The narrator’s voice penetrates thetext and, in cases of plot tension, by commenting on events it forms an intermittent course of thought, evaluates, approves, warns, tells about an unexpected plot twist, sets it a newvector of development. The rhythmic and syntactic structure of the text of P. Kulish’s story gives an opportunity to look into the inner world of the narrator, to observe the movement of his thoughts and the emotional and evaluative sphere.