The speech genre “wish”: An overview of modern linguistic papers

The article presents an overview of research literature on the etiquettical conventional speech genre “wish” in Russian and foreign linguistics. The author compares definitions of the lexeme “wish” in various lexicographic sources, considers researchers’ approaches to determining the status of a wish and identifies some debatable problems of studying the genre. Particular attention is paid to the consideration of wishes within the theory of speech acts and the theory of speech genres. The article also compares researchers’ viewpoints on the debatable problems concerning pious wishes and evil wishes, as well as gives an overview of the works concerning grammatical and syntactic means of making wishes and typical models of the genre. The article provides the analysis of works with the existing classifications of wishes based on their structure and on being etiquettical/non-etiquettical, stereotypical/non-stereotypical, etc., as well as the analysis of works based on ideas about the field structure of the genre, where the core consists of clichéd wishes, and the periphery – of non-standard statements, or (according to another theory) explicit statements and imperative/modified wishes, respectively. The research points out the importance of investigating extralinguistic factors (gender, age, status-role relations of communicants) in the study of wishes. The paper reviews articles which deal with the comparison and collation analysis of wishes in different languages (Russian, English, German, Chinese, etc.). The conclusion outlines some directions for the further study of this genre in various areas and situations of communication.

Russian language, wishes, speech acts, speech etiquette