Functional-pragmatic Characteristics of the Speech Act of Gratitude in Vietnamese and Russian Languages

Abstract

The article presents a contrastive analysis of the functional-pragmatic characteristics of the speech act of gratitude in Vietnamese and Russian. The relevance of the study is determined, firstly, by the key role of gratitude as a universal mechanism for maintaining interpersonal harmony and regulating communicative processes; secondly, by the need to identify both universal and culturally specific patterns in the context of intensifying intercultural contacts; and thirdly, by the insufficient investigation of the contrastive aspect of these linguacultures, which differ in their value orientations and politeness norms. The aim of the work is to identify the universal, nationally specific, and functional-pragmatic features of the speech act of gratitude in the languages under study. The material comprises fictional and publicistic texts from the late 20th – early 21st centuries, totaling 2,000 utterances (1,000 in Russian and 1,000 in Vietnamese), extracted from the Russian National Corpus and the Vietnamese language corpus. The methodological framework of this study includes methods of continuous sampling of linguistic material, as well as componential, contextual, interpretive, and contrastive analysis, which ensured a comprehensive approach to describing the functional-pragmatic characteristics of the speech act of gratitude. The findings establish that in the compared languages, gratitude realizes a wide range of pragmatic functions: from the basic expression of appreciation for a service to a ritualized response to a compliment, congratulation, or well-wish; it also serves as a means of agreement, polite refusal, encouragement, termination of communication, and indirect request. The obtained results deepen the understanding of the its role in interpersonal communication and reveal the specifics of its verbalization in structurally different linguacultures.