2024 Vol. 15 №3

This article discusses the results of a survey underlying a reconstruction of ideas about tact and tactlessness in Russian communicative culture.

The author considers the concept of tact to be a communicative strategy within the cate­gory of politeness that is closely related to native speakers' notion about the boundaries of private space. Thus, tact is defined as a communicative strategy driven by the speaker's desire to avoid infringing on the private space of their interlocutor. Moreover, ideas about the boundaries of private space and tact are among the most significant elements in describing a national communicative culture.

This study focuses on the tactless question as a typical way of violating private space boundaries. The survey questionnaire was based on interviewee behaviour observations, with one interviewee labelling the interviewer's questions tactless or indecent. It was established that the presence of an immediate addressee and a mass audience sets the parameters for eval­uating public statements in terms of their acceptability or face-threatening potential.

This study aims to analyse the informants' assessment of 'tactless' questions proposed in the questionnaire as regards their appropriateness in public communication. The survey re­sults are divided into the following thematic blocks corresponding to communication risk zones: age, family and marriage, religion and sex. The quantitative findings provide infor­ma­tion on the social norms intuitively classified by Russian native speakers as preventing intru­sion into private space. They also give an insight into the effect of age characteristics on sta­tement evaluations. Informants' responses tend to exhibit ambiguity in assessments, high­ligh­ting the variability of contemporary perceptions regarding tact and tactlessness, thereby ref­lecting shifts in social norms.

This article explores the semantic and pragmatic features of the word 'mother' when used as a term of address. It examines secondary uses of the term in literary texts from the 1780s to the present, a sample of 4,272 tokens, alongside dictionary definitions. The study revealed that, in different communicative situations, the term 'mother' can convey a range of some­times contradictory attributes such as 'patronage', 'superiority', 'dependency', 'strictness', 'kindness', 'overfamiliarity' and other nuanced semantic traits. The metaphor of family is extended into a broader social context and can transcend societal boundaries to enter the realm of abstraction.

The cluster model by George Lakoff, which allows for the coexistence of transfer models in secondary usage, is suggested as a tool to describe the pragmatics of addressing a person as a 'mother'. However, unlike Lakoff's works, this study applies the cluster model not to idealised cognitive models — those of birth, genetics, upbringing, and others — but a system of the usage of the word 'mother' as a term of address encompassing diverse metaphorical transfer.

This article examines the pragmatic meaning of the slang lexeme chuvak [dude], primar­ily when used as an address. The study aims to identify the components of this pragmatic meaning that contributed to the resurgence of the lexical unit in the 21st century after a peri­od of usage decline and oblivion. Currently, the word chuvak is an integral part of youth vernacular.

The pragmatics of the word chuvak was analysed by methods of corpus analysis and questionnaire survey. It was concluded that within the slang of the 1950s' stilyaga subcul­ture, the term chuvak developed strong associations with American music, particularly jazz, and American culture overall. These associations, alongside other features of the pragmatic component, such as designation as slang, contributed to the re-emergence the word at the end of the 20th century. At the time, the word was extensively used in the Russian dubbing of American films to render the English word 'dude', thus becoming familiar to younger genera­tions.

This article describes the vocative use of first names. The literature cites addressing a person by a given name as the preferential mode of politeness when the addressee's name is known to the speaker. The study aims to clarify this idea, demonstrating limitations on using first names imposed by the interactional context. It also seeks to examine the role of given names and terms of address in general from the perspective of linguistic politeness. The data used in the study consists of fragments of spontaneous interactions from the Russian Nation­al Corpus and native speakers' metapragmatic commentaries collected by the author. The methodology draws on Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson's theory of linguistic polite­ness. The literature review and data analysis revealed two interactional contexts where ad­dressing by a given name is foregone or does not seem to be preferential despite the speaker's acquaintance with the corresponding term of identification: communication between family members and service encounters. For some pieces of data, a description framed in terms of linguistic politeness appears to be suitable. Yet, a first-name address can function as not only a mitigating device but also a potential face-threatening act. Finally, there are many instances where politeness issues do not seem relevant. In these cases, it seems appropriate to describe the vocative function as a background operation to maintain social relations.

This study identifies and characterises a class of lexical units — imperative speech cli­chés, exemplified by expressions such as krepis'! [hold on!], prekrati! [stop it!] or ne lez' [back off!]. It defines the concept of imperative speech clichés and investigates the role of pragmati­cisation in their formation. The general properties of imperative clichés are described: most are either never employed with the negative particle ne [not] or are utilised exclusively with this particle. In speech communication, they function as reactions-impulses, i. e. the addresser uses one when reacting to the addressee's previous remark or their behaviour, simultaneously en­couraging the addressee to perform an action or refrain from it. A significant part of impera­tive cliches, especially reactions-impulses, are formed with perfective verbs. The use and func­tioning of imperative clichés in speech are central topics in describing the category of polite­ness, particularly in impolite and anti-polite communication.

This study aims to examine the functioning of imperative speech clichés in terms of the category of politeness. The data used in the research consisted of categorical appeals used in speech acts to interrupt or prohibit contact. A collection of examples from the Russian Na­tional Corpus — about a hundred tokens — was compiled to this end. The method of lexico­graphic description was employed to prepare a test article for the otstan'! [leave me alone!] speech cliché. Linguistic description and dictionary representation of imperative speech cli­chés are central to a comprehensive description of the category of politeness category.

This article is devoted to the speech act of compliment, which is treated herein as express­ing the speaker's attention and partiality to their interlocutor. The similarities and differences between speech acts of compliment and praise are analysed, with the characteristics of com­pliment linked to the gender and age of the interlocutor. Particular attention is paid to the concepts of speech act and speech genre and the applicability of these notions in analysing the speech act of compliment. When considering a compliment as an independent act, the con­cepts of 'speech act' and 'speech genre' serve as synonyms. When a compliment is part of a complex utterance consisting of several different speech acts, 'speech act' and 'speech genre' refer to disparate concepts. This article examines cases of compliment usage as an independent act (speech genre) and within other speech genres, such as requests, gratitude expressions, consolations and condemnations, where a compliment amplifies or mitigates the speaker's intention.