International journal
ISSN 2311-0759 (Online)
ISSN 2311-0740 (Print)


promise

Comissive as a behavioral action: linguistic and cultural features

The paper deals with a problem of speech acts cultural analysis. Structurally and semantically, speech acts have been thoroughly investigated in Pragmalinguistics, but their cultural potential may be a new and interesting direction of studying cultural characteristics of speech. Comissives – speech action types expressing speaker’s intention to commit themselves to certain obligations – are represented by a number of actions, their most common prototype is a promise and their close correlate is a threat.