pragmatics

The article is aimed to consider the genre of prayer presented in the diaries of Leo Tolstoy. An analysis of the entries reveals that over the course of his life Tolstoy recorded several dozen prayers he made up. The article examines recorded appeals to God in syntactic, semantic and pragmatic terms. The research uses methods of description, conceptual and pragmatic analysis. The study reveals that Tolstoy violates the accepted canons, modelling an individual appeal to God.

The issue of classifying and structuring genres of sublegislative discourse is under consideration. The premise is found to be M.M. Bakhtin's proposition of dialogic imagination. The well-defined system of genres was developed under the influence of goals and strategies of discourse, the character of institutional interaction, variety of social and communicative events. Structuring genres was based on: 1) character of the leading intention and community of functional purpose.

The article is devoted to the description of lexeme «truth» functioning features entering different speech genres. The word «truth» is referred to the group of discourse words providing speech coherence, reflecting the process of interaction between the speaker and listener, as well as conveying attitude of the speaker to what has been said. The study considers broad understanding of discourse words as structural components of the speech genre that realize illocutionary functions and are associated with speech steps of the speaker in the creation of genre.

The given research is a continuation of the series of articles devoted to contrastive research in speech domination in the Russian and Chinese languages. In Chinese as well as in Russian, by using the pronoun «мы» («we») instead of other pronouns, an addresser substitutes the semantic composition of the subject and thereby manipulates the addressee in order to control the way the latter understands the message. As a result, he pronoun «мы» reflects common laws of communicative human behaviour in both languages.