Farewell - a Sorrowful Word ( Farewell - a Genre, a Concept, a Speech Act?)

In the article the author focuses on the concept of “farewell” and provides the procedure for its investigation different from the one having been applied in the recent decade in Russian linguistics, where the entrenchment of the latter has been affected by the influence of the school of Voronezh, as the author assumes. The author compares the concept with the frame, on the one hand, and the concept with the speech genres, on the other hand. The three “types” of farewell are being considered - a farewell to a man, a farewell to a place, a farewell to the epoch - all of them are being regarded as the modifications of the concept of “farewell”, having been conditioned to some extent by the period of time the texts had been produced in, with the concept incorporated into their headlines. The concept itself, in Foucault’s terminology, may be assigned to the concepts of discontinuity, assuming thresholds, transformations - in one case this is the transformation of a personality.

concept, frame, the primary and the secondary speech genre, concept modification