Linguistic representation of imperative meaning in the speech genre of order in Russian folktales

In the course of social interaction every person enters various social thematic relations with language reflecting their realizations. Providing adequacy of communication, a speaker uses language means according to the role, which is realized in a specific communicative situation. Speech genre in this case acts as a communicative context in which social thematic relations between communicants are shown. One of important conditions of realization of social thematic relations is imperative speech genres, the communicative core of which forms expression of motives to action. On the material of Russian folktales language means of expression of imperative meaning in the speech genre of order are analysed, which correspond to realization of high social roles. The speech genre of order comprises the following semantic pragmatics components: 1) I (the speaker) have a power to stimulate you to action, and you (the addressee) are aware of this; 2) motivation comes from the speaker who has enough right to bind the addressee to make actions; 3) a high social role of the speaker formulates a set of standards regulating speech and actions of the communicants. The communicative pragmatic approach to the research of the speech genre of order allows talking about a wide range of language structures, the aim of which is to actualise imperative meaning. In the texts of the Russian folktales the imperative meaning of the speech genre of order is coded by means of many language signs, which allow differentiating direct and indirect types of motivation. Items of lexical-morphological and syntactic levels express the direct form of the motive. They are: 1) the imperative in form of the second and third persons with the particle let; 2) performative verbs to order, to cause, to induce somebody to do something in the first person of the present tense; they can be grammatically combined with the infinitive and imperative forms; 3) infinitive forms; 4) elliptical sentences; 5) imperative interjections; 6) construction of conjunction that + verb in the past tense. Markers of emotional expressive tones of order are the pronominal subject you in postposition, particles well, hey, now then, adverbs right away, momentarily, exactly and so on. Interrogative sentences and statements with the meaning of threat represent the indirect type of order in the speech genre of order. Description of situations of the speech genre of order is made by means of the verb to order in the singular of the past tense and constructions with the noun order: to deliver an order, my/his/her order, order of somebody, and so on. Reference to the texts of Russian folktales reflecting the speech genre of order admits to see deep penetration of social thematic factor into the language structure.

Keywords

Authors

References