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


речевое действие

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.

Prediction as a Speech Genre

The article deals with a speech act «prediction», its content is a categorical declaration of future events. Semantically it is a type of communicative concepts, and pragmatically, it combines characteristics of declarations and commissives. Predictions may be either rationally determined or intuitively generated, the former are typical of a scientific discourse whereas the latter mostly function within religious and habitual communication.