Mishchenko V. 3. Compliment in the speech behaviour of British and American speakers of English

3. Object of research: complimenting as a variety of speech behaviour of British and American speakers of English. Purpose of research: to expose and theoretically ground structural semantic, pragmatic and ethnocultural features of compliment in speech behaviour of representatives of British and American cultures. Methods of research: text search, speech modelling, quantitative and qualitative analysis, semantic and pragmatic discourse interpretation, contextual analysis, intentional analysis, speech act analysis. New theoretical results: сompliment is examined within the framework of the activity-based approach to language and speech with its emphasis on such categories as "purpose" and "means". Model of speech action integrating the theories of speech acts, speech activity and politeness is developed. Complimentary utterances are treated as means of achieving qualitatively different communicative purposes, as language realizations of speech actions combining an illocutionary act, a perlocutionaryact and a social action. The main issues of the analysis are the illocutionary purposes of compliment, mechanism on which the perlocutionary act of compliment is based and factors determining its efficiency, classes and types of compliments - social actions as well as their stuctural, semantic, pragmatic and ethno-cultural features.