COMMUNICATIVE-PRAGMATIC FIELD AS A METHOD OF COMPREHENSIVE DESCRIPTION FOR MEANS OF SPEECH ACTS REALIZATION
Comparative studies of two or several languages are a priority of the modern linguistic science. Such studies help discover similarities and differences in the structure and functioning of the languages under study, which in turn may serve as a basis for typological generalizations. There is a tendency to cover all the levels of language structure as well as every single phenomenon, although no such multifaceted comparison has been completed for a concrete language pair so far. Along with some other linguistic phenomena, those of text and discourse still remain to be explored. The main constituent of discourse is the speech act that follows the rules and principles of speech behavior inherent to a given language community. A key component of the speech act is represented by illocutionary force which characterizes the communicative intentions of a speaker and embodies the communicative function of an utterance. Various means of expressing every concrete illocutionary act can be represented as a field. Examination of this field allows us to discover how frequent and prototypical each single means realizing a given utterance in the language is. The field principle has proven to be a productive means for revealing relations existing in the lexical-semantic and grammatical system of language. The article introduces a new type of field, the communicative-pragmatic field, intended for the analysis of linguistic realization of communicative behavior of interactants. The first part of the paper defines the place of the field in question among other types of fields, and describes the principles of the organization of the field as well as its structure and composition. The aim of a communicative act or its illocutionary force is regarded as a dominant that provides a possibility to consolidate all possible speech act realizations with a given illocutionary force in a language into a field. Thereby “communicative-pragmatic field” is understood as the totality of utterances realizing the same illocutionary purpose and the same strategy of communication. The second part discusses the main principles and peculiarities of the linguistic analysis based on the communicative-pragmatic field approach through the example of several speech acts. It also presents some communicative-pragmatic fields in Russian-English and Russian-German comparison. Special attention is focused on the place of performative utterances and indirect speech acts in the composition of different communicative-pragmatic fields. As a rule, performative verbs and utterances are generally regarded as prototypical forms of the realization of a certain illocutionary purpose. The results of the investigations however support the conclusion that the role of performative utterances in the expression of an illocutionary force depends on the speech act class and speech act type. It is possible to distinguish three types of coherence: 1) illocutionary act can be realized only by means of a performative verb (ex. christen, excommunicate etc.), 2) performative utterances are prototypical for the realisation of the illocutionary act, but besides there are many other means to express it (ex. excuse, promise, thank etc.), 3) illocutionary verb denoting the aim of the action can never be used as a performative one (ex. threaten, deceive, offend etc.)
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Issue: 1, 2013
Series of issue: Issue № 1
Rubric: LINGUISTICS
Pages: 58 — 67
Downloads: 1501