Performatives as a tool of expressing the addresser’s intentions in document texts (case study of response letters)

The article reviews the performative as one of the main indicators in determining the genre and subgenre variety of the document text. The article deals with the features of performatives functioning as a significant structure-content component of the document text. The research is based on the response letters selected by continuous sampling method in the institutions and budgetary organizations. The comparative analysis of the subgenres among business response letters has been carried out. The priority performatives which express the addresser’s basic intention, are separated in each subgenre of the response letters. Along with the priority performatives, the author of business letters can use secondary performatives which provide or finish an addresser’s main aim. Furthermore, the quantitative research of the performatives functioning has been fulfilled, and the results have been achieved which demonstrated the most common performatives in the concrete subgenre of response letter. It considers the varieties of performative utterances (explicit and implicit), which are indicative for response letters, and the author has discovered the pragmatic features of performatives in the analyzed subgenres of the response letters. As a result, it is revealed that the author of a waiver letter frequently uses implicit performatives to mitigate the negative perlocutionary effect caused by the semantics of the negative reply.