Speech Acts with Polite Diminutives: Genre and Discursive Features

The study delves into speech acts with diminutives used for politeness, focusing on their discursive and genre-related aspects. It draws on authorial recordings of colloquial speech, data from the National Corpus of the Russian Language, and recordings of urban speech from the 1970s and late twentieth century. The research highlights the potential usage of polite diminutives in diverse discourses linked to everyday life, especially in oral and interactional discourses. Detailed examples in the form of speech acts from various speech genres (information transmission, requests, proposals, commands, instructions, etc.) illustrate the deployment of polite diminutives in specific discourses: retail, administrative, medical, daily financial transactions, creative discussions (or gift presentation) by the speakers, as well as in speech genres of requests (predominantly in domestic discourse) and proposals (mainly in the hospitality discourse). The analysis concludes that the politeness function of diminutives in these speech acts exhibits specific characteristics across different discourses and speech genres, evolving from various derivational diminutive meanings (affection, diminishing), speech strategies (flattery), and registers (the so- called "nanny language", the language in which adults speak to small children). The multifaceted nature of diminutive usage within diverse communicative contexts underscores the complex interplay between linguistic forms and social enactment of politeness strategies.