PRAGMATIC COMMENT RELATIONS IN THE SYSTEM OF ENGLISH DISCOURSE FUNCTIONAL LINKS

Abstract

The article considers the issue of adjacent utterances functional interaction through which discourse sense space is formed. In particular, the input of the pragmatic comment relation in this process is analysed. The topicality of the stated problem arises out of the necessity to reveal the participation of linguistic means in building up constructive and promising, or, conversely, destructive and hopeless for society, role of verbal communication. Methods of the functional linguistic analysis make an optimal research basis to this end. Examples of English discourse from books by American and British writers of the XX–XXI centuries are taken as the empirical material which models typical communicative situations. Proceeding from works by T.A. van Dijk, functional relations are defined as pragmasemantic links between utterances in a speech chain in the process of communication between the sender and the recipient of the message.The author looks into the specificity of the pragmatic comment relation in comparison with other functional links of discourse, the range of the pragmasemantic meanings under discussion, different variants of contamination of pragmatic comment functional components with relations of other types. The pragmatic comment relation is special due to the fact that, unlike other links, it does not advance the narration propositionally; it only discloses the speaker’s personal impression and modality of his/her perception of the situation. It is this emotional sensation that makes the purport of superphrasal unities which actualize the given functional relation. The growing frequency of such emotive linguistic means is also noted in business communication, which usually shows the communicativepartners’ strife for solving their professional tasks by exerting the desired rhetorical impact on each other.Finally, the author concludes that pragmatic comment as a special type of pragmasemantic links in English discourse reveals a variety of the meanings expressed, stylistic effectiveness and wide occurrence in fiction and actual speech.