Comparative analysis of strategies of politeness in Russian and English

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine a selected corpus of strategies of politeness in Russian, to analyze their usage in a cultural, political and historical context and to compare them to equivalent terms in English. The goal of this work is to demonstrate the different choices of polite expressions, as well as the interpretation and strategies for their translation in English and Russian communicative cultures. The main part of the thesis is dedicated to the study of the functional principles of politeness and translation problems to do with forms of address in intercultural communication. It focuses on strategies used for establishing a display of politeness, their linguistic meanings and specific characteristics. A comprehensive approach is used in the project, based on a functional communicative, comparative and contextual analysis of grammatical and lexical polite constructions in both languages, mainly in written texts of Russian and English. A set of strategies used in spoken and written polite language is also defined, and the linguistic means related to polite language and realizations of these means are also examined. This study thus aims to display the value of the nuances of cultural difference through the analysis of strategies of politeness in Russian and English. The study covers many linguistic examples taken from modern and classi Russian and English literature, and their translation and interpretation, with a view to mapping the Russian and English national character or national habits through the concept of politeness. A comparative analysis of politeness is shown through original and translated passages of novels, poems and stories of Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Victor Pelevin, Alexander Pushkin, Vladimir Nabokov, Edward Lear, Jane Austen and others. The expressions of politeness in Russian, which are masked in terminations, diminutive suffixes, idiomatic expressions, forms of directness and indirectness, will offer an overall picture of the well-mannered Russian language, following the model established by Tatiana Larina in her seminal study Category of Politeness and Style of Communication (2009).