Structural and semantic types of warning utterances in the German dialogical discourse

Abstract

The article uses the material of modern German-speaking dialogical discourse to define the structural and semantic ways of expressing the speech acts of warning, taking into account its hybrid nature. The speech act of warning is a hybrid illocutionary type, which is characterized by the simultaneous realization of two illocutions – assertive and directive. These illocutions are related at the level of propositional content: the directive component is the motivation of the addressee to a specific action in the interests, and the assertive component is the reporting of a certain state of affairs relevant to the action predicted in the motivation. By the criterion of the language expression the speech acts of warning demonstrate two types – explicit and implicit. Explicit speech acts of warning occur when: 1) the assertive and directive components are explicitly expressed; 2) the warning illocution is expressed by the explicit performative formula of the type Ich warne dich. The implicit speech act of warning has three types – with an implicitly expressed directive component, with an implicitly expressed directive component and with implicitly expressed both components. Eleven structural and semantic models of the speech acts of warning are established in the German dialogical discourse, among which three are explicit utterances and eight are implicit. The most common means of expressing the speech acts of warning in the German dialogical discourse are the performative formula, the conjunctions sonst and denn, conditional sentence with the wenn conjunction, utterances of imperative structure and modal verbs.