This paper attempts to describe the semantics of politeness and the totality of means of its implementation in modern Russian. The approach is based on the hypothesis of the existence in the grammatical system of the Russian language of functional and semantic category of politeness, the plan of content of which consists of semantic components of polite communication (respect, benevolence, parity, etc.

), and the plan of expression is made up of multi-level (morphological, syntactic, vocabulary, lexical, combinatorial) language means, serving for representation of the specified meaning. In terms of structure, the category under consideration is a field formed by two main microfields: the microfield of courtesy in situations of persuasive character and the microfield of courtesy in situations of non-intrusive character.

The paper describes the semantic content of courtesy and the means of expressing it in situations of request, advice, suggestion, apology, comfort, gratitude, greeting. The work will be of interest to specialists-philologists, students, postgraduates, as well as anyone who is interested in the problems of the Russian language.

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