Pejorative vocabulary in the works of Mykola Gogol and its rendering in German translations

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the contrastive analysis of the contstituents of insulting illocutionary acts in the discourses of the words by M. V. Gogol and their German translations. The main attention deals with lexical means of insulting however the dominance of the speaker’s intention is to degradate the hearer. The need for comparative study of speech acts, in particular on the material of translations of works of fiction, is determined by the accumulated volume of knowledge about speech acts and the need to separate the universal provisions of the theory of speech acts from nationally relevant ones. The aim of the article is a comparative analysis of the constituents of illocutionary acts of insult in the discourse of works by M. V. Gogol and their German translations, as fiction models reality, and therefore the texts of fiction are the most accessible source for considering the features of these speech acts. As one of the initial stages, a comparative study of speech acts presupposes the isolation of their invariant and variational parts. The invariant part of speech acts consists of the essential, characterological constituents, and the variational constituents are insignificant. Essential constituents are fixed, or preset, and nonessential ones are non-fixed, or not pre-set. In the descriptions of speech acts only fixed constituents are subject to specification. If some constituent turns out to be unspecified, this does not mean that it is not present at all, but it only testifies to the fact that this speech act is not sensitive to it, i. e. with respect to this speech act this constituent is not relevant. There are also such constituents which may remain non-actualized.