Specificity of heterogeneity of banquet speech genre in English ritual discourse

The article deals with heterogeneity of banquet speech genre in English ritual discourse. Defined in terms of cognitive and discursive approach, the utterance is a simple or complex communicative action serving for a definite purpose and realized through/via a speech act or a sequence of speech acts. The choice of speech act is determined by the strategies and tactics of a typical scenario of a speech genre. The speech act scenario is characterized by heterogeneity expressed in compositional and stylistic variability. Drawing on the official banquet speeches at Final banquet given to Olympic competitors and officials in honor of the end of the Olympic Games in London in 1908 the obligatory and variable features of the banquet speech (the genre of ritual discourse) are revealed. Obligatory constituents of the genre under study are the address to the participants of a banquet, the thematic introduction indicating the purpose of this ritual occasion, evaluation of the event caused it, the final address to the participants. Each stage of the scenario of the “banquet speech” genre corresponds to a certain speech act or a their sequence (SA of social vocative, gratitude, compliment, praise). The heterogeneity of the “banquet speech” genre is shown in variability of composition, rhetorical and genre-and-stylistic devices as well as in the possibility of a speech genre “toast” in the final part.