Imperative verb aspects: a pragmatic approach

In order to understand the differences in the use of the Russian verb aspects, it is necessary to go beyond the bounds of the language system into the field of pragmatics. In this paper, we investigate the pragmatic content of verb aspects in requestive speech acts (one of the three subclasses of directive speech acts), in particular in requests, prayers and invitations. The traditional grammatical meanings of the aspects form the basic pragmatic aspect level, which for the Imperfective aspect represents the expression of repeated, habitual actions or actions in progress which are therefore incomplete, while for the Perfective aspect -the expression of a single completed action with the emphasis on the result. Under the influence of extra linguistic communication factors, first of all the socio-psychological relationship between the speaker and the hearer, the semantics of verb aspects may acquire additional secondary strictly pragmatic meanings, which form the second pragmatic aspect level. In the subclass of requestive speech acts, there are two such meanings - expectedness or unexpectedness of the causative verb to the hearer. These meanings are introduced by the author of the paper as a result of the investigation of imperative sentences from the Russian National Corpus. The summation of the pragmatic meanings proper to all directive speech acts represents the pragmatic potential of imperative verbs aspects. The study of the perfective and imperfective functioning in directive speech acts taking into consideration the extralinguistic background makes it possible to better understand the specific features of Russian verbs aspects. The pragmatic approach to the study of Russian verbs aspects can turn into a new methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language.