The present article deals with rhetorical potential of the aphoristic genres on the example of the didactic goals achieved by their means in L.N.Tolstoy’s «Reader’s Companion».
The article "Small talk: classics of the genre" by N.A. Karlik focuses on to small talk - the leading speech genre of pre-revolutionary noble subculture. The main task of the author is to clarify the place of small talk in modern Russian linguoculture, to define communicative situations in which etiquette forms of communication are in demand. The refereed source contains the results of the research carried out on the basis of the corpus of texts by Russian and foreign writers, the author's direct observations, as well as the data obtained by means of specially designed questionnaires. The author defines the genre markers of small talk, a set of traditional topics of communication, forms of using non-verbal means. Summarizing the results of the study, the author concludes that the main regulator of small talk at all levels, which determines the choice of some topics and tabooing of others, the choice of appropriate postures, gestures, mimic signals, is the "law of pleasure".
