Concept of Communicative Roles in Modern Linguistics: Challenges and Research Perspectives

Abstract

Abstract. The article addresses the issue of communicative roles from viewpoint of their discursive and cognitive properties. Particular attention has been given to the problem of communicative roles’ interrelation with other cognitive-discursive phenomena. The research aims at identifying the main approaches to the communicative roles in present-day linguistics with a focus on the roles’ interplay with related concepts of identity, “face” and subject’s positioning. In handling the research tasks, the paper employs the compound methodology involving the general scientific methods of induction, deduction, introspection and analysis added by the method of generalization of scientific results in different areas of discursive research in order to identify functional properties and cognitive-discursive manifestations of communicative roles. The major findings relate to interdisciplinary significance of the concept of communicative role for such approaches of the modern cognitive-discursive paradigm as critical discourse analysis, conversational analysis, face and politeness theory, positional theory and role identity theory. The paper identifies discourse-forming functions of communicative roles in conversation structuring and development in support of the idea of the role exchange or turn-taking as the basic category of conversational discourse. The cognitive facet of communicative roles relates to their interplay with cognitive-discursive phenomena, including identity, subjective positioning, and personal and social face. The paper focuses on two vectors of interrelations: the discursive facets of identity, subjective position and “face”, manifested by communicative roles, and functions of roles in identity-building, face-maintaining and subject position forming.