Primary and secondary means for the social categorization of addressee in Russian imperative statements

The issue of the social categorization of the addressee in imperative statements is a constituent question of the larger problem of communicative imperative strategies and tactics in different linguistic cultures. The subject of the research is the means of social deixis in Russian imperative statements. Imperative forms of Russian verbs can reveal relative or absolute social status of the addressee due to their strongly marked conative and phatic functions. This refers to informal and formal address pronouns - or so-called “T and V forms of address”. The capacity of a verb to indicate the social status of the addressee, the psychological or social distance between the speaker and the hearer makes it one of the grammaticalized means of social deixis. Impersonal verbal form can also be an instrument of the social categorization of the addressee because of its primary perlocutive effect and its traditional use in the situations that presuppose a strict hierarchy and therefore social and psychological distance between the addresser and the addressee. Apart from the said grammatical means, the Russian imperative statements may contain lexical means of social deixis. Both grammar and lexical means can be combined in the statements, and their use can be marked or unmarked. The article proposes a new organization of the social deixis category in the verbal imperative statements of the Russian language on the basis on the integrative communicative approach. This enables to use the research materials and results in the preparation of theoretical and practical courses on communicative grammar of Russian as a foreign language. The ethno-specificity of the issue determines the practical significance of the study: some linguistic categories show a greater connection between cultural values, social hierarchy in society, and their conceptualization in language than others, and the ability to use them correctly underlies the communicative competence of an individual.