Journal archive

Abstract: This analytical review paper studies politeness formulas in Russian and Chinese. The paper gives the bases of comparative research of intentionally marked utterances: etiquette formulas of greeting, saying goodbye, appreciation, request, wish, pardon in two languages belonging to different families. The results of the experiment make it possible to reveal the similarities and differences in the scope of etiquette formulas, as well as their situational and contextual use in business and everyday communication. The authors come to the conclusion that the etiquette formilas in Chinese and Russian are different in the number and stylistic differentiation. The analysis revealed that even native Russian spakers do not use the whole scope of etiquette formulas in their everyday and business communication. Non-native speakers use a very small number of etiquette formulas. Due to the language interference, some formulas from the Chinese language may be transferred to communication in Russian. Poor knowledge of Russian hinders differentiation of the stylistic coloring of the “colloquial - literary” and “substandard - standard” types. As a result, Chinese students do not often correlate the etiquette formulas with different situations of communication, which, by no means, requires perfection of the methods of teaching Russian as a foreign language in the functional and communicative aspects.