Title screen

The article aims to demonstrate a consistent methodology for conducting cross-culturalresearch of verbal communication behaviour and identifying its peculiarities in differentlanguage cultures. First of all, the author discusses the problem of defining a basic unit ofcommunication crucial for the analysis of communicative behaviour and proposes her owninterpretation of such a unit called speech behaviour pattern (SBP). The illocutionary contentand general organization of any SBP is considered universal, while their actual realization in alanguage is culturally conditioned and therefore may vary significantly in different languages.Utterances that constitute a certain SBP are organized into a field with a prototypical centreand a gradationally formed periphery, which is referred to as communicative-pragmatic field(CPF). The proposed methodology of contrastive analysis includes the following four majorcomponents: 1) definition of illocutionary purpose, 2) description of structural forms of SBP(i.e., their lexical and grammatical characteristics), 3) identifying communicative-pragmaticfactors, 4) description of the structure and hierarchy of the communicative-pragmatic field thatincludes utterances implementing SBP. The presented approach is then consistently applied tothe analysis of the SBP of INVITATION in the Russian and German discourse. The language dataare taken from the existing Russian and German corpora. The proposed methodology helps toidentify the main similarities and differences in the implementation of the SBP INVITATION inRussian and German driven by grammatical and communicative-pragmatic factors.