Abstract:
This paper is focused on the analysis of the directness of requests in relation to the semantics of the verb chosen by speakers of the Ukrainian and Japanese languages to name an action of the addressee. Studies of the directive speech acts reveal a wide use of the imperative mood in Slavic languages in general, and specifically in Ukrainian as well. Though complementary strategies are pointed out to mitigate directness, especially such as the use an equivalent of ‘please’ or diminutives, however there is a still possibility for further approaches to mitigate directives with the imperative mode. On the contrary, Japanese is a language in which requests are expressed mostly indirectly. The aim of this article is to detect if there are certain divergences between Ukrainian and Japanese speakers in determination which verbs they use to name an action of the addressee and as well as how the meanings of such verbs are related to the directness or indirectness of the speech act. The data was collected from 37 native speakers of each language by the method of a discourse completion task. Participants were offered the same communicative situation (to ask the classmate to close a box which he or she left inadvertently opened). This communicative situation lies between request and demand, which may result in mitigation of the directness.
