Aspect-based opposition of imperative verbs in prescriptive and suggestive speech acts (a case study of the Russian language)

In this paper, we investigate the use of aspects of imperative verbs in the Russian language with a particular focus on two subclasses of directive speech acts - the prescriptives (command, permission, instruction, order, requirement) and the suggestives (proposal, advice, warning). In our research we adopted a pragmatic approach, i. e. studying the verb aspects, we focused on the extralinguistic factors of communication. The aspect differentiation of imperative verbs used in directive speech acts is based on the nature of the causative action. It is shown that the aspects of imperatives implement two types of meanings in prescriptive and suggestive speech acts: 1) grammatical (the imperfective aspect is used to express an action in progress, to express the duration or repetition of an action, while using the perfective aspect the speaker expresses a single concrete action with a focus on its completeness and result); 2) pragmatic (the imperfect is used when the causative action is expected by the addressee, while the perfective aspect expresses an action that is unexpected). Our study presents the results of a comparative analysis of prescriptive and suggestive speech acts in oral communication or direct speech. We have established that the imperfective imperative is used to express proposal, advice, permission, and requirement, while the perfective imperative is used in proposal, advice, permission, warning, command, requirement, instruction, and order. The use of imperatives in different aspects in the same speech act is associated with different pragmatic meanings. Special attention is paid to the so-called ‘competition of aspects’. It is demonstrated that the linguistic-pragmatic approach allows one to clarify the functioning and correct use of the different aspects of imperatives in speech acts, in so doing it can have a practical importance in improving the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language.