Психолінгвістичні аспекти дослідження німецькомовного конфліктного дискурсу (на матеріалі німецькомовних інтернет-текстів)

Abstract

The paper presents an overview of the main tendencies in modern discourse studies in German-speaking circles, further referring to the problem of communicative self-presentation strategies used by the participants in virtual conflict discourse and their usage in certain conflict situations. The linguistic, sociological and psychological aspects of conflict communication play an important role in the research of discourse in German-language discourse studies. The research groups such as the Vienna circle and the Duisburg school of discourse analysis integrated theories on conflict discourse, inter alia the hegemony theory developed by E. Laclau and Ch. Mouffe or the theory of conflict discourse of J. Habermas into their research, focusing mainly on the problem of racism and right extremist discourse in the German-speaking public sphere. The modern research includes also sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of racist discourse research. Scientific works published in the last ten years focus mainly on problems of hidden racism within public and social institutions and racist discourse within teenager groups. The study of different sociological and psychological factors of communicative behavior are aimed at reconstructing social crises and forecast of future tendencies in order to avoid further cases of discrimination in society. With the growing importance of media as source of knowledge and instrument of influence, virtual communication becomes an integral part of discourse formation and articulation. On the one hand, such special features of the Internet, as spontaneity of communication, anonymity of the users, as well as the unlimited number of potential participants, provide a free choice of instruments of self-presentation. On the other hand, however, they involve certain limitations of the communication process itself: such features as social status, social or physical power can no longer be source of influence on the opponent. Thus, participants of conflict discourse have to defend their own and their social group's positive image by choosing suitable communicative strategies of self-presentation and presentation of the opponent. Positive self-presentation in conflict discourse includes a strong division of communicative space into oppositional categories, such as ME (US)-YOU (THEY), GOOD-BAD or RIGHT-WRONG, where the ME (US) group is credited with positive qualities such as good, intelligent, experienced, rightful etc, whereas such negative qualities, as bad, stupid, inexperienced, wrong are attributed to the opponent group. The analysis of such self-presentation strategies and categorization processes allows making conclusions about the mental aspects of discourse practices in separate social and ethnocultural groups basing on psycholinguistic features of intercultural and interpersonal conflict discourse.