Speech genre “zamechanie” on the scale of “politeness – anti-politeness”

The article analyzes major linguistic and pragmatic properties of utterances that native Russian speakers classify as ‘zamechanie’ (roughly, critical remark). The purpose of the research is twofold: firstly, to answer the question whether ‘zamechanie’ can be seen as a speech genre and, secondly, to determine its position on the “politeness – anti-politeness” scale. The analysis is based on the data from the Russian National Corpus and recordings of oral speech collected by the author. Based on linguistic and extralinguistic criteria, the research shows that ‘zamechanie’ can be interpreted as a speech genre. Though the variety of guises of ‘zamechanie’ in speech makes it difficult to describe the formal linguistic properties of the remarks under study, the analysis of corpus data allows us to identify a number of speech formulas with which native speakers of Russian express their critical assessment of the addressee’s behavior. In addition, the specifics of ‘zamechanie’ as a speech genre can be identified by analyzing the metacommunicative comments of Russian native speakers: regardless of the specific language design of the remarks, they are identified as ‘zamechanie’ due to a common intention – the speaker’s need to critically evaluate and (ideally) change the behavior of the addressee. It is the negative assessment that distinguishes “zamechanie” from advice, order, recommendation, question, hint, etc. The pragmatic properties of ‘zamechanie’ are analyzed in the article from the point of view of the pragmatic concept of ‘face’. The analysis of contexts allows us to conclude that ‘zamechanie’ is a speech genre that poses a threat to the addressee’s “positive” face, since by making a remark, the speaker indicates that the addressee’s behavior does not conform to socially accepted attitudes and norms. 

speech genre, ‘zamechanie’, politeness, metacommunication, speech formula, positive face, social norm