Lingual Means of Imperative in the Lecture and Sermon Discourses

Abstract

The research aims to reveal the peculiarities of the linguistic means of imperative utterances which function in the lecture and sermon discourses. They encourage students/parishioners to engage in the learning process fully. The following tasks were formulated: to categorize imperative utterances in the view of characteristic features of the mentioned discourses; to characterize the lexical-syntactic peculiarities of each type of imperative phrases. The object of the research is an oral English-language institutional discourse of two kinds – academic (lecture) and religious (sermon). The subject of the study is the lexical and syntactic arrangement of imperative utterances in the lecture and sermon discourses. To achieve the aim, both general scientific and unique linguistic research methods found application. Conclusions of the study are as follows: the functioning of imperative utterances in the sermon and lecture discourse is determined by such linguistic and extralinguistic factors as the expressiveness/implicitness of the imperative constructions, the syntactic structure of the imperative constructions, the communicative-pragmatic orientation, and the targeted nature of the order/ localization of the imperative construction in the compositional text structure. In our work, direct and indirect explicit constructions, aimed at an immediate action, are viewed as operational imperative statements. According to the communicative-pragmatic orientation and considering the temporal signs, we distinguish two main types of motivation: simultaneous and post-communicative. The communicative-pragmatic orientation criterion also makes it possible to single out constructions intended to induce physical/mental impact (in lectures) and spiritual/mental impact (in sermons). The prospect of further investigation is studying non-verbal features of lecture and sermon discourses.