Lexical Ways of Expressing Explicit Politeness in German Linguoculture

• Main Author: Rafael A Gazizov
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University) 2014-12-01
• Series: Russian journal of linguistics: Vestnik RUDN
• Subjects: немецкая лингвокультура; эксплицитная вежливость; речевой этикет; речевой акт
• Online Access: http://journals.rudn.ru/linguistics/article/view/9384

The article deals with lexical ways of expressing explicit politeness forms in the German linguocultural community. Speech acts of greeting, saying good-bye, apologizing, thanking, requesting, giving advice, offering help and making invitations are used to analyze most frequent means of realization of explicit politeness, the latter acting in verbal communication as a graded phenomenon. The use of modal and introductory verbs, modal particles, adjectives, adverbs, distant and contact communication forms, specific politeness modificators are demonstrated to be most common lexical means of expressing the type of politeness under consideration. Frequency of use of different parts of speech in the structure of etiquette formulas in German allows us to situate politeness at one or another level (high - medium - low) i. e. etiquette units implement the category of explicit politeness with various degrees of intensity. The use of the forms expliciting varoius levels of politeness is connected with communicants' specific intentions, such as paying attention, showing interest, mitigating imposition, and implying further incentive to act. The German linguocultural community is characterized by frequent use of neutral forms of expressive speech acts and stylistically elevated forms of incentive statements representing undogmatic and nonurgent forms. To conclude, specific national peculiarities of explicit politeness in German liguoculture are formulated.