DIMINUTIVE-BASED COMMISSIVE SPEECH ACTS IN CHILDREN’S PROSE DOMAIN

Abstract

The article deals with English diminutives from the perspective of Speech Act Theory. Central to the research are commissive speech acts, which are performed either by the speaker or by both the speaker and the hearer. Those speech acts imply that the speaker is obliged to behave in a certain way. Besides, special attention is paid to the main word-building patterns of forming diminutives (synthetic and analytical). The article follows the theoretical postulates of J. Searle, K. Schneider, A. Wierzbitska, etc., and considers the ideas put forward by contemporary scholars (e.g. P. Biały, A. Buriakovskaia, A. Kiklewicz). The corpus of the study is based on popular writers’ works for children (e.g. R. Dahl, J. Strong, J. Wilson) wherein the defined diminutive-based commissive speech acts comprise those of offer, announcement, suggestion, promise and threat.