Implicytne performatywy w języku rosyjskim i ich rola w konwersacji

Abstract

The present study concerns linguistic pragmatics and the speech act theory. Speech acts have been studied with reference to the implicitness of performatives directly linked with the other element of the binary opposition, i.e. their explicitness. The interpretation of implicitmess in speech acts points to the unit of pragmatic structure, where the pragmatic meaning of an unettered performative shifts to the grammar, semantics and intonation of the utterance which is adequate in a given situation and is regulated by the context and the interlocutors’ action. It has been confirmed that such implicitness is characteristic of ‘normal dialogues’, where interlocutors tend to minimize verbal communication and often leave out obvious elements of information. The author’s aim has been to investigate both performative and nonperformative signalling of illocutionary meaning referring to two types of speech acts, defined by Searle as assertives and directives. She has tred to find out what (semantic, grammatical contextual, situational, pragamtic) conditions limit the use of explicit performatives and hich of them (being implicit) determine the right interpretation of the speaker’s intentions. The language material is dialogues taken from artistic texts that imitate colloquial speech. The interpretation of the key notions of pragmatics allows one to define constatées as accounts of the world and illocutionary utterances, in which the speaker’s intentions are signalled. The notion of assertive should be clearly distinguished from that of assertion, which is a logical rather than a linguistic term. The author analyzes concrete linguistic devices that make constatives distinct from subjective ways of speaking in assertive speech acts. The subject of the observation has been conversations, debates, arguments and quarrels, which are often pragmatically ambiguous. The illocutionary force of directive speech acts has been analysed on the basis of requests, permissions, commands, demands, prohibitions, suggestions, advice and recommendation. The conclusions show that all kinds of pragmatic meaning are found in the utterances with both explicit and implicit performatives. Even apparently unambiguous performatives are pragmatically complex and resist unequi vocal interpretation. In the case of implicit performatives the pragmatic sense of the unnamed verb is conveyed or even intensified by the directive context, situation, semantic meaning of the proposition, grammatical forms, including imperatives and certain non-imperatives, interrogative requests, contextual shortcuts and intonation. The study provides rich language mateial that can be used in teaching Russian as a foreign language.