Linguacultural aspects of the value and semantic attitude to the speech act of promise in Russian

Abstract

The study develops the speech acts theory in terms of the “condition of sincerity” (Searle 1965). It aims to identify the attitude to the speech act of promise in the Russian communicative culture. The article analyzes the statistically significant consolidation of the value and semantic attitude to the speech act of promise considered as a specific action. The data were drawn from the Russian-language corpus ruTenTen11, provided by the research resource Sketch Engine. The corpus linguistics methods were applied to extract a subcorpus of occurrences of the query “promise” (311,365 occurrences) which was used to identify the value and semantic attitude to it. The results showed that in the Russian language, the speech act of promise is perceived mainly negatively. The word “promise” is fused with the lexical and semantic field of the “empty word”. This contradicts the normatively fixed meanings of the word “promise” itself, as well as the essence of the speech act of promise. The “condition of sincerity” in relation to the speech act of promise is marginalized and becomes meaningless. The study showed that the methods of corpus linguistics open the prospect of clarifying the features of not only modern word usage, but also the linguistic and ethnocultural context of such large groups of statements as speech acts. The article contributes to the theory of speech acts in terms of identifying the essential features of the “common ground” (Clark Carlson 1982) of the participants in communication, as well as contributing to the development of linguistic axiology. The proposed methods can be used to identify the attitude to other speech acts in Russia and other linguistic communities. The results can be used in teaching Russian as a second language.