Verbal and nonverbal means of expressing friendliness in the Russian-speaking sociocultural environment

Abstract

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 friendli-ness is defined as a person’s friendly, kindly attitude to people and the outside world. Atten-tion 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.