Speech strategies in pathoanatomic discourse: the communicative aspect

Abstract

The relevance of the work involves the growing interest of linguists to the problem of studying medical discourse as a complex-functional communicative education. In this article, the pathoanatomic subdiscourse, being a lacunar zone in the space of medical discourse, is in focus of our attention. The paper presents the results the author gained through the communicative-pragmatic analysis of empirical material of pathoanatomic subdiscourse fragments. The following speech strategies are described: dominant (preliminary, diagnostic, and explanatory) and complementary (pragmatic, dialogical, and rhetorical). The functions of the preliminary and diagnostic strategies are aimed at intra-medical communication, while the explanatory strategy chiefly intents to build communication with the relatives of the deceased. In turn, the functions of complementary strategies are implemented as follows: a pragmatic strategy is responsible for organizing the goals in terms of communication between the interlocutors, a dialogue strategy assumes responsibility for building a correct and accurate dialogue scenario, a rhetorical strategy allows you to effectively influence the interlocutor. These speech strategies are closely related and embedded into the communicative phenomenon of the pathoanatomic subdiscourse – a manipulative-explanatory strategy targeted to emotionally and comfortably inform the relatives of the deceased about the causes of death. Speech strategies explicate a number of speech tactics, which are expressed through specialized and non-specialized ways of actualization. The revealed and interpreted communicative components of the pathoanatomic subdiscourse allow us to draw the following conclusions: this subdiscourse has specific features (it is structurally and semantically mobile, historically changeable and communicatively asymmetric); actualization of the ways of executing the speech strategies that build the communicative aspect of the pathoanatomic subdiscourse is a complex communicative area of medical discourse that needs further study