COMPLIMENTARY EXPRESSIONS WITH POSITIVE ASSESSMENT OF MEN AND WOMEN IN THE PERIOD OF THE VICTORIAN ERA (BASED ON JANE AUSTIN’S NOVEL “PRIDE AND PREJUDICE”)

Abstract

The article deals with the polivectoral analysis of complimentary speech acts that contain a positive evaluation and are used by a speaker to create a certain emotional state of the addressee and evoke his positive feelings. Due to their discourse character, expressions with complimentary components attract attention of many scholars but not all of them describe compliments as subtypes of structural semantic units. It is caused by semantic and communicative pragmatic peculiarities of compliments. Compliments may be based on the evaluation of a person‟s character traits, his appearance, clothes, moral qualities, skills and abilities and others. A list of potential objects for praises and compliments is rather big but only some of them are very frequent used in the complimentary expressions. A complimentary speech act is usually connected with two interlocutors – a man and a woman. In the speech of a male, compliments are usually focused on the character of the speech addressee. These speech acts appear as a result of various verbal activities because individual peculiar features of interlocutors are realized in such processes. In their communication women very often use complimentary speech acts but males, in comparison with women, pay compliments less often. The most numerous complimentary speech acts are the ones that are based on the traits of character of the interlocutors. Women consider that other important features for the compliments are appearance, place of living, and mental and physical abilities. Men think that abilities of their interlocutors are more important in comparison with appearance, while home, a place of living as objects for compliments do not belong to the structure of masculine complimentary speech acts. Texts written at the time of Queen Victoria‟s reign (1837–1902) are of special interests for linguists as at that time compliments were hidden, unlike their free usage in modern speech. The objects of compliments in Jane Austin‟s novel “Pride and Prejudice” are of 4 categories – appearance, character, skills and home.