German

The increased interest in the analysis of human verbal behavior leads to the need to define a basic unit of the communication sphere which could serve as the basis of its analysis. The first part of the article provides an overview of different speech units proposed by various authors, such as a speech act (J. Austin and J. Searle), speech genre (M. Bakhtin), situational, aspect and parametric model of communicative behavior (I. Sternin), speech action pattern (K. Ehlich und J. Rehbein).

The paper presents the analysis of the speech behavior pattern of REQUEST in Russian and German. In the first part of paper the illocution of REQUEST is defined in terms of Natural Semantic Metalanguage. The contrastive research is carried out from three different angles. Firstly, from the structural viewpoint, main language patterns of the realization of REQUEST are described. Secondly, from the pragmatic viewpoint, it is considered whether and how the situations in which Germans and Russians express REQUEST are different.