Learning linguistic politeness: A social history of eighteenth century Russian

This study is a synchronic investigation of a pragmatic aspect of the normative language behavior in eighteenth-century Russia. Although it draws on the discipline of historical pragmatics it does not attempt to draw conclusions about the evolution of the language; rather, its goal is to examine the state of the language at a given point of time, the second-half of the eighteenth century. The study is a analysis of eighteenth-century Russian language behavior and writes a chapter in the social history of the Russian language through an investigation of a little-studied genre, the conversation book. In addition to a purely linguistic analysis of the texts, the dissertation also investigates the social and educational environment that produced the conversation books. This examination includes an overview of areas affected by the use and production of the new genre of conversation books---contemporary pedagogical ideology and goals, especially in the matter of language acquisition as well as publishing in the context of the Imperial Academy of Sciences. The work draws on Brown and Levinson's theory of linguistic politeness (1987), which claims universality in the strategies that speakers use in their interactions; this dissertation tests the validity of the theory by applying it to eighteenth-century Russian texts. The data analysis demonstrates some problems with Brown and Levinson's theory of linguistic politeness, specifically in regard to the claimed universality of the strategies, the sentence-level approach to data, and the lack of a neutral baseline against which to measure imposition levels. The use of address terms within the conversation books is evaluated as a potential signal of face-threatening acts. A maxim of duty is proposed as a criterion in behavior guidance as reflected in the conversation books.