Authors

Ilenia Del Popolo Marchitto¹;  ¹ Tallinn University School of Humanities, Estonia

Discussion

This contribution aims to propose a corpus-based analysis of the different pragma-semantic functions of the linguistic form of imperative in Russian language. According to the speech act theory, imperatives may be classified as explicit directives with a strong illocutionary force, whose purpose is to cause the hearer to take a particular action. However, the link between linguistic form and meaning is not straightforward as it might seem. In everyday communication the uses and implications of the morphological imperative mood are far from being limited to prescriptive speech acts, such as requests, commands, prohibitions and permission, or suggestive speech acts, namely proposal, advice and warning. In fact, as a result of diachronic conventionalization of certain linguistic expressions and/or pragma-semantic change, loss or reduction of meaning of grammatical forms and lexical items took place. Pragmatic markers, set phrases and formulaic sentences represent a clear example of these linguistic processes. Thus, it is relevant to investigate from a qualitative and quantitative perspective the peculiar occurrences of imperative constructions and their relative functions in context. The analysis will be carried out by examining the written transcriptions of the “ORD” (One Day of Speech) corpus of Russian everyday speech, which was created by means of the continuous 24-hour recording method in order to fix the most spontaneous speech in natural communicative situations.