PRAGMATIC PURPOSES OF THE USE OF EVASION SPEECH STRATEGIES IN DIPLOMATIC DISCOURSE
The paper compares specific Russian and English lexical and grammatical means of understatement and mitigation speech strategies that modify the communicative intention of the speaker. The object of the study is emotional and evaluative means aimed at the implementation of evasion strategies in diplomatic discourse as a sequence of specific speech acts (based on the statements and speeches of the Russian diplomat Vasily Nebenzya). The subject of the study is to identify and compare those emotional and evaluative means from the pragmatic point of view. The relevance of the problem under study is due to the need to analyze the characteristic Russian-language and English-language means and techniques of evasion strategies that are used in diplomatic discourse, when the state of affairs in the world may not be entirely conducive to the implementation of traditional speech tactics. The methods used in the work are the descriptive method, the method of continuous sampling, and the comparative method. It was found that the Russian-language lexical and grammatical means partially correspond to the classification of Yu. B. Kuzmenkova adopted for English-speaking communication. In particular, it was revealed that the technique of minimizing the significance is not actively used in order to express disagreement with restraint, to express disapproval. The range of functional semantics of Russian-language particles is wider and focuses not so much on the function of minimizing the significance of an utterance, but on strengthening and emphasizing significance. There was revealed the use of various techniques within the framework of one strategy when translating Russian speech into English. The pragmatic attitudes of the strategies used also often do not coincide. However, despite the differences in the ways of achieving goals, understatement and mitigation are recognized as integral strategies of speech behavior in diplomatic discourse. At the same time, the conducted analysis testifies to the difficulty of applying the classification by Yu. B. Kuzmenkova in the transition from emotional-evaluative vocabulary to the syntax of the Russian language in the case of using interrogative sentences of phraseologized structure. They may involve not only mitigation of direct motivating statements, but also affirmation or denial with enhanced emotional and evaluative meaning, which is not typical for English speech, which is aimed at understatement of speech acts of incentive, assertion, disagreement, rejection, uncertainty, negative evaluation, negative attitude.