CONTEXTUALIZED PRAGMATIC CHARACTERISTICS OF INVITATION SPEECH ACTS IN THE RUSSIAN LANGUАGE CULTURE

Abstract

Due to methodological and theoretical variety in approaches as well as in contingences while investigating invitation speech acts, the findings concerning their pragmatic characteristics have turned out to be different. This paper is an attempt to determine sociocultural features, pragmatic implications and representation
 in the dialogue corpus of various types of invitations in Russian culture using contextual interpretation and pragmalinguistic analysis The findings demonstrate a frequent usage of addressee-oriented declaratives, followed by imperatives, questions and addresser-oriented declaratives with the meaning of a command. All these invitations are in fact direct obligatory impositives.
 However, within the context of Russian culture they reveal the use of positive politeness strategies. The speech act of invitation cannot function on its own – it is semantically
 and pragmatically connected to pre-invitation sequence, which makes it a complex speech act. The benefactive status of the addresser is enhanced due to the obligatory nature of the invitation which also ensures the speaker’s confidence about the successful outcome of the interaction, therefore there is no need for the inviter to resort to indirectness and negative politeness strategies. There are cases of self-invitations where an invitee takes the initiative, hereas an inviter has to perform a speech act with a weakened illocutionary force.