(Im)Politeness in Russian and English Requests and Commands

The thesis analyzes directive illocutionary acts, more precisely requests and commands. The thesis consists of two parts: the first part is a theoretical one, which reviews the Speech act theory, politeness theories and the phenomenon of impoliteness and Culpeper's perspective on it. The practical part of the thesis analyzes police detectives' interactions in two crime drama TV series – British Broadchurch and Russian Метод. The collected instances of requests and commands were grouped according to the type of action required. The goal of this thesis is to compare and analyze how English and Russian speakers formulate requests and commands as directive speech acts and find similarities and differences among them