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Linda Apse. Pieklâjîbas formu izteikðanai angïu un latvieðu valodâ lietoto lingvistisko ..<br />
195<br />
I will demonstrate how impersonalisation is rendered through imperatives, impersonal<br />
verbs and modals, passive constructions and impersonal or deleted pronouns<br />
as these linguistic forms are believed to be the principal linguistic structures where<br />
impersonalisation occurs for the reason of moderating a FTSA.<br />
1.1. Imperatives<br />
Commands, commonly verbalized by imperatives, no doubt are the most straightforward<br />
FTSAs. It should be stated at the outset that in imperatives the Speaker is<br />
not linguistically present at all and thus all strategies to save the face concern the<br />
Addressee only.<br />
Commands are face threatening intrinsically and are realized by a very peculiar<br />
linguistic form, namely, the subject that normally is the agent, in imperative structures<br />
becomes the potential agent. Thus the argument structure of imperatives is, if<br />
not morphosyntactically, then semantically a bit awkward. Be it for this reason or<br />
other there is compelling evidence that in many languages imperative forms do not<br />
contain the second person pronoun, i.e. the addressee, and it remains to be implied.<br />
The following are imperative forms in English and Latvian:<br />
(1) Bring it now! Atnes tûlît!<br />
(2) You bring it now! Tu atnes tûlît!<br />
Both in English and Latvian, it is still possible to mark the addressee explicitly<br />
as illustrated in (2) but such form of a command is regarded as extremely rude as<br />
instead of hiding the Addressee it is disclosed and thus goes against the above mentioned<br />
face saving strategies. It can be further hypothesized that in English where the<br />
verb has a zero inflection both for the plural and singular second person the Addressee<br />
cannot be readily labelled as one particular person since it may well be a group. In<br />
Latvian the verb inflections encode the number leaving the Latvian imperative more<br />
face threatening than its English counterpart.<br />
(3) (Tu) atnes tûlît! (2nd , sing) (Jûs) atnesiet tûlît! (2nd , pl)<br />
Brown and Levinson claim that in a great many inflected languages the imperative<br />
inflection does not encode person while other inflections do. It can be thus concluded<br />
that the imperative being one of the most face threatening language structures<br />
has certain linguistic features that help to save face.<br />
1.2. Impersonal verbs<br />
In many languages, in intrinsically face threatening speech acts, certain verb<br />
forms are impersonalised. Both in English and Latvian verbs that normally take dative<br />
agents, in potentially face threatening speech forms the dative agent is normally<br />
deleted:<br />
(4) It appears (to me) that…. (Man) ðíiet, ka…<br />
It seems (to me) that … (Man) liekas, ka …<br />
It looks (to me) that…. (Man) izskatâs, ka…