COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES AND TACTICS OF THE PARTICIPANTS IN SMALL TALK

Abstract

The article focuses on the study of communication strategies and tactics used by participants of small talk. The material under analysis is the English-language literary discourse. The linguistic analysis of the selected data has been based on the application of the pragmatic linguistic method, cognitive method, the component analysis. The article analyses linguistic definitions of small talk and describes possible types of relationships between participants of small talk. It has been established that it is not the communicative, but the pragmatic function of the language that is foregrounded in the genre of small talk. Based on the analysis of our own factual material, it has been proved that adhering to Politeness Principle is the main communicative intention of the participants of small talk. The article offers our own classification of communication strategies and tactics that realize positive and negative politeness in small talk. The following strategies of positive politeness have been forwarded: 1) the contact-establishing strategy (realized by the tactics of showing interest in the interlocutor and a positive evaluation), 2) the strategy of group identity (realized by the tactics of intimization (secrecy), social advantage and negative evaluation of other people (gossip)). The strategies of negative politeness include: 1) the strategy of utterance mitigation (realized by the tactics of making a statement less categorical and mitigating negative assessment), 2) the strategy of advancing the status of the addressee (realized by the tactics of compliment and flattery), 3) the face saving strategy (realized by the tactics of subject change and evasion of a question). All the outlined strategies and tactics have been supported by the factual data taken from modern English literary discourse.