The discourse of instructions - between cognitive and anthropological linguistics

In this paper, the discourse of instructions corpus (DIC), composed of Bunjevac speech, Kosovo-Resava and Prizren-Timok dialects, spoken in a wide area in Serbia, was applied theoretical and methodological approaches common to anthropological and cognitive linguistics in order to demonstrate the mechanism according to which giving instructions functions in a specific oral speech. Based on the analysis of DIC, we came to the conclusion that instructions are given in cases of describing situations which involve an established sequence of events (or actions) that must be followed, and which contains elements of iterations (repeatability), which excludes giving instructions for unique and individual events and actions, such as biographical stories, historical events, personal and family history and so on. Taking into account this analysis, the thematic inventory of instructions proved to be significantly larger in relation to the inventory of instructions which the linguists have dealt with so far. The analysis of examples from DIC showed that the typical linguistic means for giving instructions is the second person singular of the present tense, which indicates the speaker’s awareness of the existence of the recipient (researchers) of the research situation, which does not mean that the researcher is also the recipient of instructions given in field interviews. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 178010: Jezik, folklor i migracije na Balkanu