The role of external components of the speech act in a provocative psychotherapy session

Abstract

The article analyzes the external speech act components in the session of provocative psychotherapy and characterizes their functional roles. The aim of the paper is to study the process of speech interaction between a psychotherapist and his patient from the perspective of implicit pragmalinguistics, to identify relevant factors that realize the speaker’s intentions to influence the listener, to determine the conditions for their implementation. The relevance of highlighting the designated range of problems is explained by the interest to them of both highly specialized doctor engaged in pragmalinguistics, and the general public - people who want to know the process of speech creation, capable of readjusting the thinking process and/or behavior of a person requiring psychological help. The study is based on the classification of external components of an act of speech highlighted in 1975 by D.H. Hymes: speaker, listener, message form, topic, code, communication channel and setting. These components were studied by the authors from the position of latent pragmalinguistics on the basis of medical discourse of the psychotherapeutic genre, so variant denotations were given for the speaker and the listener: the speaker is the sender of the text or the psychotherapist; the listener is the receiver of the text or the patient. The study of the external components functionality of the speech act was based on R. Jakobson’s works devoted to this topic. Studying the external components function of a speech act in psychotherapy, the authors come to the conclusion that each of them is subordinated to the common goal of any speech creation - to influence the interlocutor (in our case - the patient) implicitly, to transform the destructive worldview attitudes and to induce him to a certain speech act. Such an effect is carried out by means of actualization of grammatical forms, common for both participants of speech interaction.