L’atto linguistico del complimento: analisi di quattro talk show in russo

The goal of this work is to analyse the nature and the structure of the compliment as a linguistic act in Russia, on the basis of a corpus of videorecorded compliments taken from four television talk-shows. We chose to collect the compliment corpus in the peculiar communicative setting of talk shows because in this frame competent speakers try to build up a reciprocal solidarity and intimacy carrying on a symmetric and spontaneous conversation. The compliment forming the corpus of this work have been taken from the television programmes Modnyj prigovor (“Condemnation to fashion”), Mužskoe/Ženskoe (“Male / Female”), Žena. Istorija ljubvi (“Woman. A love story”), Lolita, being broadcast during the years 2015-2016. The features of these programmes are briefly shown (par. 2). After a survey on the Russian linguistic literature about compliments, and after having introduced the pragmatics and the semantics of the compliment, this work will pinpoint the formal structure of the compliments in our corpus. We will see how, inside a conversational turn, compliments are often articulated in sequences, chains and series, and how they follow the rules of an internal “Dialogic syntax” (Du Bois 2014). On the semantic side, it will be shown how much the semantics of compliments is due to the intensification and de-intensification processes, expressed by phonetic, lexical and syntactic strategies. Moreover, in order to check how the context of talk show could influence the formulation of compliments, the more frequent formulas in our corpus have been briefly compared at first to the more frequent formulas in a corpus of spontaneous compliment in Italy, and then they have been compared to the more used formulas in two other compliment corpora taken from talk shows in Italy and in Albania. To sum up, the analysis carried on in this work shows that the linguistic act of compliment is marked on every linguistic level (lexicon, syntax, prosody). Its low formulaicity is especially due to self-politeness strategies and to a specific accuracy for creativity in narration.