SPECIFIC CHARACTERISTICS OF TY-/VY-FORMS IN RUSSIAN AND ITALIAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURES

t. This paper presents the first part of research on the particularities of Ty-/Vy you/polite You, both 2nd person singular in the Russian and Italian languages. Far from the ambition of presenting the definitive account of the subject matter, the author identifies the main issues related to the investigation of these lexico-grammatical forms functioning in speech. Thus, such investigation of this matter implies researcher’s focus on: (1) particularities of Ty-/Vy-functioning as the means of speech etiquette, specifically, in the functions of addressing, as well as in the concrete speech acts, in which the choice of the pronoun determines the grammatical realization of the statement (for instance, a request), (2) contextual meanings of these forms in cases when they serve as the means of an expressive function and the description of their peculiarities of their use in Russian in rigid phraseological units. At present, a contrastive analysis of concrete speech acts appears promising (and productive) method of interpretation of the national speech etiquette specifics. The paper presents the results of the study on the peculiarities of the use of the Ty-/Vy-forms as the means of speech etiquette in concrete situations of verbal communication. Comparative (contrastive) analysis of Russian and Italian allows to demonstrate the specifics of these two forms in either of the studied linguistic cultures. An additional focus of this paper is the investigation of the recent trends in the use of these forms in contemporary Italian. The study revealed the similarities and differences in Russian and Italian communicative behavior. The findings of the study can be applied in the context of teaching the etiquette of crosscultural communication and Russian-Italian translation.