Kontrastive Untersuchung von Sprachhandlungsmustern

Abstract

Summary The increased interest in the analysis of human verbal behavior leads to the need to define a basic unit of communication sphere, which could serve as the basis of its analysis. The first part of the article provides an overview of different speech units proposed by various authors, such as a speech act (J. Austin and J. Searle), speech genre (M. M. Bachtin), speech action pattern (K. Ehlich and J. Rehbein). As a conclusion to the overview, the authors propose their own interpretation of the basic unit of communication, which they call “speech behavior pattern” (SBP). The illocutionary content and general organization of SBP can be considered universal, while its realization in a language is culturally conditioned and therefore may vary significantly in different language communities. Utterances constituting a certain SBP are organized as a field, which includes a prototypical center and a gradually formed periphery. The second part of the article considers the major factors and components of the contrastive analysis of SBP including: definition of illocutionary goal, identifying communicative-pragmatic factors and the implementation of major structural forms of SBP, contrastive description of the structure and hierarchy of communicative-pragmatic fields in the languages under analysis. Finally, the article reveals differences between the notions of equivalence and adequacy and describes possible relations between them in contrastive linguistics.