The speech act of promise in communication in Polish and Russian The topic of this paper is the speech act of promise in Polish and Russian. The purpose of the contrastive analysis is an attempt to identify and describe the speech act of...
moreThe speech act of promise in communication in Polish and Russian
The topic of this paper is the speech act of promise in Polish and Russian. The purpose of the contrastive analysis is an attempt to identify and describe the speech act of promise from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics. The language material includes examples taken from the corpora of the Polish and Russian languages and from observations of colloquial speech.
The paper locates the act of promise in the classification of speech acts proposed by Austin, Searle and Formanovskaya. The aim of this paper is to determine the felicity conditions of this speech act from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics, as well as to present the functioning of this act in language communication.
The basis of the analysis is the structure of the act of promise proposed by the present author. The article analyses explicit expressions of promise using the performative verb (e.g. I promise that I will write the letter tomorrow; I promise I won’t cry anymore) and other lexical markers of this speech act, as well as implicit speech acts of promise characterized by the use of the future tense (I will be your friend; We will rule wisely) or the present tense referring to the future (You prepare the translation and receive money).
Key words: commissive speech acts, linguistic pragmatics, speech acts, promise, semantics
