Scholarly record
PROCESSING OF COMPLIMENTS IN RUSSIAN: PSYCHOLINGUISTIC STUDY
Abstract
The communicative approach in teaching languages presuppose studying the forms of speech etiquette, rules of behavior in everyday life and rules of communication with people of different social groups. Knowledge of the ways to express different illocutionary acts and the ability to use these means is a key to successful communication. The "compliment" is one of the most important categories in the theory of speech acts. The purpose of this study was to describe an illocutionary act "compliment" on Russian language material by using a method of graded standard. On the first phase of the study the informants were given a task to write down all forms of compliments they found typical for Russian. 1772 compliments were revealed from their questionnaires. We also analyzed 102 compliments found in the textbooks. The objective of this phase was to select the most frequent means of expressing compliments for further analysis. In the second phase of the study, the objective was to discover the results of a direct ranking of compliments. A joint list encompassing 47 most typical compliments was assembled for this purpose, which created a graded standard (Shabes, 1989). The results of the study indicate that gender, age, degree of acquaintanceship are relevant parameters for the content of a compliment. These parameters are strongly intercorrelated. Studies of illocutionary acts (e.g. compliments) have the potential to build cross-national understanding of concepts, particularly when applied in educational settings.
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References7
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