Филологические науки/ 7. Язык. Речь. Речевая коммуникация

Doctor of Philological Science Kudryashov I.A.

Southern Federal University, Russia

Dialogical text interactional analysis

Speech communication is a process of intentional impact on the interlocutor’s cognitive thinking with the aim of creating the mutual psychological comfort atmosphere. This kind of impact could be both intensified and soft-focus, therefore the speaking person chooses this or that speech genre, faces with the response – speech or non-speech – reactions, which complicate or facilitate achieving the pre-marked goals. This aspect is of particular importance for investigating the language tools through which the communicative partners show their real intentions to each other, express consent or disagreement with the opponent’s verbal behavior. The pragmatic nature of the addresser’s language design intentions largely determines the perspectives of the developing dialogical interaction, its rationality for both interlocutors. Obviously, this kind of pragmatic nature could not be formed with – in terms of methods of expressing – strictly homogeneous elements, particularly in the dialogical situation where the partners pursue opposite aims and occupy different positions in the social hierarchy.

These extra-linguistic factors of dialogical communicative process often determine the speech way of manifesting the intentions, different degrees of their explicitness. As the consequence, in real dialogical communication practice the interlocutors initiate the indirect speech acts, the illocutions of which are formed and expressed with peripheral way speech actualization of functional and semantic categories. In its speech level the indirect impact representation is implemented as the semantic dissonance between the form and content of dialogical utterance. The utterance acquires additional semantic augmentation, begins to serve as an effective way of attracting the interlocutor’s attention to the necessity of complying with the addresser’s communication step which has been previously initiated. Thus, the peripheral way speech actualization of functional and semantic categories entails the dissention between the utterance language and speech meanings: the softened language tools realize the intensified speech impact. Therefore, the indirect speech act functional aspect affects such interactional sphere as emotional and evaluative speech components. In the spontaneous dialogical speech the interlocutors’ attention to the context of such utterances is manifested with the richness of linguistic tools served for emotion expressing in striving to convey different shades of feelings occurred between the interlocutors.

In the dialogical communication the initial indirect speech act replica is designed to foster the response emotions and estimations that should be the same as currently experienced by the speaker. Assertive speech acts as a peripheral way of expressing the imperativeness in the spontaneous dialogical speech are frequently used. Our observations reveal that assertive replicas expressing subjectively determined imperative meaning, as a rule, contain the negative evaluation of the addressee’s current state of affairs. Cf. (all the practical illustrations are taken from the polish dialogic speech):

(1) “ – Niepotrzebnie robi pan te wszystkie zastrzeżenia. Pańskie pragnienie jest zupełnie zrozumiałe.

Bartek musiał przyznać, że nie tego się spodziewał... ” (J. Seipp. Królewna).

The subjective negative evaluation enhances the replica prescriptive meaning. In the addresser’s opinion, the following presumption is to be activated: the recipient will consciously change the state of affairs which does not deserve the positive estimation. In prognosticating the expected speech reaction the initiator of indirect imperative act comes from the absolutized estimation of his personal position, takes into account only those conditions which he considers to be important for him. The speaker recognizes this arrangement as the interaction semantic focus. At the same time this indirect speech act appears to be the pragmatic way of expressing the speaker’s current emotive state (censure, annoyance). In other words, the peripheral ways of expressing functional and semantic category analysis could give an investigative chance for defining the correlation between the indirect act semantic structure and the characteristics of the speaker’s psychological current state.

The interrogative utterances which also reinforce the communication with both positive and negative emotions are considered to be quite productive actions transposing into the pragmatic sphere of indirect imperative acts.

Cf.: (2) “– Dlaczego mnie zwodzisz? Dlaczego nie przyznasz się, że jesteś Amosem i wiesz o mnie wszystko? – Nie jestem żadnym Amosem. Nazywam się Andzej Mos” (O. Tokarczuk. Don dzienny, dom nocny).

In pragmatic terms such interrogative utterances could be regarded as prohibitive and expressive speech acts. The indirect sense of the underlined utterances is formed by two their meanings: firstly, planning the changes in the listener’s behavior (Nie zwodz mnie! Przyznaj się !); secondly, inoculating the recipient with the emotions currently experienced by the speaker. And in this dialogical communication the listener does not maintain the dialogue initiator’s communicative strategy, therefore, deliberately ignores indirect illocution of the interrogative utterance and reacts to its primary (actual interrogative) meaning. In line with the second meaning the empathy focus emerges in the utterance, i.e. identifying the speaker with the recipient, the participant or the object of the reported event. Depending on the specific conditions of the current communicative process the actualization of one of these meanings could be more explicit, the actualization of other meaning could be less explicit. Their intersection, neutralization or mutual positive resonance is also theoretically possible. Everything depends on the degree of restrictions imposed by the socio-cultural conditions upon the dialogical communication.

Thus, the peripheral way speech actualization of functional and semantic categories in dialogical communication is accompanied, as a rule, with additional emotional and evaluative components, which makes this actualization an effective means of appeal to the recipient’s cognitive and volitional spheres. Imperativeness expressed with the utterances non-imperative in the form takes their impact into the recipient’s world of knowledge and feelings, i.e. ultimately affects the recipient’s modus. At the same time, such forms of will expressing give the speaker a chance “to pragmatisize” both his / her Self and Other(s) in the current communicative act. The recipient factor makes the speaker properly organize the pragmatic structure of his / her dialogical replica. The speaker solves communicative specific tasks within the sphere of interpersonal relationships, and therefore all of the indirect speech acts are always addressed. Speaker’s applying to the indirect speech tactics might either meet the recipient’s interests or be harmful to the recipient. In the first case the addresser does not dare to speak openly about his / her intentions, implementing of which might impede the interlocutor’s actions (for example, expressing the proposal through indirect interrogative utterance); in the second case the speaker refuses to directly express his / her intention, as he believes his communicative task to be reprehensible (for example, when generating utterances with the meaning of threat where the role relationships between interlocutors play an important role). But in these and those circumstances the primary plan of interlocutors’ speech behavior includes a commitment to support the current communication, i.e. utterance phatic function which is in general an important feature of imperative speech highlights in the dialogical communication. The speaker corrects his / her dialogical utterances in accordance with the external manifestation of the recipient’s response to the previously made impact, pragmatic and cognitive reasoning for this response. We consider the communicative function of addressing as a macro-function, inside of which there are several components associated with such functional types of addressing as appellative, phatic / contact, characterizing, emotive, appellative-describing. The speaker’s replica is aimed at achieving the mutual understanding with the recipient and appears to be the bearer of several above-mentioned functions.