Actualization of the speech genre of greetings in linguocultures of different-structured languages.

Abstract

The article is devoted to the speech genre of greetings and its actualization in the Russian and Chinese languages. According to M.M. Bakhtin, an outstanding philosopher, founder of the theory of speech genres, a person masters the language in the format of acquiring its “genre repertoire”. Such a repertoire includes speech genres − models of various types of statements, such as questions, congratulations, wishes, gratitude, etc. The choice of these genres is determined by the situation of interaction between communicants. Greeting is an indispensable ritual of speech etiquette, which is performed to maintain comfortable interaction between participants of communication in any linguoculture. The very pronunciation of a greeting or the use of an appropriate greeting gesture, or a ceremony, is an “actualization” of this speech genre marking a situation of meeting and initiating communication. The scientific novelty of this study lies in the approach to studying and comparing greetings of languages, which have different structures, mainly Russian and Chinese, within the framework of the theory of speech genres. The aim of this article is to find out and interpret the similarities and differences in the actualization of the speech genre of greeting from the point of view of linguoculturology, the branch of linguistics that studies manifestations of culture of an ethnic group reflected and entrenched in the language they speak. In order to carry out a comparison analysis, three types of greetings, traditionally offered in phrasebooks and foreign language teaching manuals, were selected, based on a high frequency of their use. These types are: 1) greetings common for a situation of formal style communication, 2) time-bound greetings, 3) those used in conversations between friends and family, i.e., close people who know each other quite well. The study revealed that in both languages, greetings of the first type contain the semes of wishes of well-being and hopes for health in Russian «Здравствуй(те)» and Chinese “你好”. In greetings of the second type, the similarity of forms and meanings is also traced. Bright differences in the forms of actualization of SG of greetings are observed among the third type of greeting. For example, in Chinese linguoculture there are greetings reflecting a special, respectful attitude of the Chinese people towards rice and food on the whole, for example, “你吃了吗?” (meaning “Did you eat?”).