SPEECH ACT OF INVITATION AND ITS PERFORMING IN THE SPANISH LANGUAGE

Abstract

The article presents the results of a linguopragmatic study of the speech act of invitation, actualized by the means of the modern Spanish language.The essence of the concept of «speech act of invitation» is revealed, its place in the system of speech acts of the Spanish language is determined, and the specifics of the implementation of the speech act of invitation in the Spanish- speaking linguistic culture are revealed.A speech act is considered as a speech action performed by a speaker with a specific purpose; the minimum unit of speech activity. By performing a speech act, the speaker seeks to achieve certain goals, to influence the consciousness and behavior of the addressee.An invitation is defined as a request or offer to do something, to come, to arrive somewhere, to participate in something.The speech act of invitation is classified as directive-requestive speech acts, because it aims to encourage the addressee to do something, assumes the speaker has a corresponding desire, and its propositional content always consists in the addressee performing a certain action in the future.It has been established that an invitation in Spanish can take the form of direct and indirect speech acts. The use of certain forms of invitation is determined primarily by the parameters of the communicative situation and depends on the correlations «official/informal communication situation», «symmetrical/ complementary relations», «sincerity/formality of the invitation».According to the pragmatic function, we distinguish real and feigned invitations. The latter are often represented as ostensible or ritual ones. Such invitations are not followed by a discussion of details, their purpose is phatic.At the pragmatic level, such invitations are only expressions of good intentions and nothing more, their pragmatic function is demonstration of attention and sympathy of the speaker to the interlocutor.The Spanish language is distinguished by a wide range of lexical and grammatical means of expressing invitations. The response to invitations is speech acts of consent and refusal of varying degrees of categoricality.Refusals, as well as invitations, can be real or feigned.