in the Russian-speaking sociocultural environment
The paper proposes a brief review of verbal and nonverbal means of expressing friendliness in
the Russian-speaking sociocultural environment. It is a case study of literature examples from
Russian National Corpus and L. N. Tolstoy’s novel, “Anna Karenina.” The notion of friendliness is defined as a person’s friendly, kindly attitude to people and the outside world. Attention is drawn to the positive semantics of the notion investigated. The friendly attitude value
dominants include well-wishing, benevolence, sympathy, and goodwill towards people.
Beingness, focus on the object, and intentionality are the main conceptual features of friendliness. The factual material analysis allows distinguishing the verbs denoting particular verbal
actions related to friendliness in speech. Words of greeting, farewell, encouragement, or
praise, pronounced in a friendly tone, present the speaker as a friendly person. Some verbs
semantically incompatible with the adverb friendly have been identified: to cry, to yell, to
shout, to scream, and to squeal. It is also impossible to scold, to reproach, to blame, and
to condemn in a friendly manner because these actions are associated with rudeness, abusive
words, and disapproving opinion. In linguistic terms, friendliness is realized by combining the
verb of speaking and the adverb friendly or its synonymous variants. It is argued that the key
factors for expressing friendliness on the verbal and nonverbal levels are the emotional and
expressive connotation of the voice, the tone of the statement as a whole, and a specific set of
facial and gestural movements.
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in the Russian-speaking sociocultural environment // Сибирский филологический журнал. 2020. № 4. Pp. 264–276. DOI: 10.17223/18137083/73/18.