Gnatyuk L. Pragmatic and Functional-Communicative Aspects of Politeness (on the Material of the Modern Ukrainian Language).

Within standard speech-act theory, speech acts have been successfully investigated by a lot of modern prominent scientists. In this paper a significant shift of viewpoint is suggested - an effort to describe pragmatic pecularities of utterances of politeness is made. The research work on the pragmatics of politeness starts with the analysis of politeness as social and language phenomenon. It moves on through the study of usage of utterances of politeness to their situations i.e. Request, Invitation, Apology, Gratitude, Congratulation, Sympathy, Permission etc. Finally, the investigation of the role of conversational implicature in the process of pragmatic interpetation in the indirect illocutions, e.g. in ironic utterances, is suggested. In the dissertation an attempt has been made to the systematic analysis of the communicative strategy of courtesy by different means, both direct and indirect. The conducted research has proved that polite formulas are mostly realized in expressives, requestives andperformatives. Different kinds of illocutionary acts are called by different speech situations (it depends on how does the speaker convey the illocutionary force of an utterance) and not always supposed to express feelings of people who speak them out. Not always the utterances of politeness perform expressive function. As a rule, people do use polite formulas while addressing each other, without any feelings. In such cases they constitute a special sort of performatives which tend to call the polite atmosphere for human interaction. In the paper functional-pragmatic classification of utterances of politeness as illocutionary acts to their speech situations in terms of certain goals and principles of appropriate communicative behaviour has been worked out. The dissertation has moved from relatively firm ground - the maxims of politeness - to a more uncertain area where it is focused on the indirectness as the strategy of politeness and on the role of such a traditional stylistic device as irony in the hinting strategy. Moreover, a distinction between irony as the linguistic phenomenon and as a stylistic device has been suggested.