COMMUNICATIVE AND PRAGMATIC LEVEL OF VERBAL MANIPULATION

Abstract

This article focuses on the study of communicative, pragmatic and gender aspects of verbal manipulation, throwing light on its manifestation in Modern English dialogical discourse. Dialogical manipulative situations have been revealed and classified on the basis of their discursive communicative and pragmatic characteristics. The analysis of differences in men’s and women’s manipulative utterances has been performed.

The article analyzes the discursive nature of the verbal manipulation, establishes the models of its implementation in English dialogical discourse taking into account the gender aspect. The basic structural model of the manipulative situation in the dialogical discourse consists of such components: an addresser, an addressee, a message, an addressee’s and addresser’s worlds, communicators’ visionary worlds, a social situation, each of which forms its own level.

The basic means of the “addresser-addressee” level are communicative roles, which are divided into standard and initiative. The latter is subdivided into active and passive roles. Women's manipulative speech is characterized by initiative roles of care, benevolence and interest. For men, such a communicative behavior is possible only in connection with the role of an expert or the standard communicative role (a son, a brother, a husband). Women also use the role of an expert, but in combination with the standard roles of their sister, girlfriend, and mother. The analysis of communicative roles allowed differentiating between cooperative and conflictive types of the manipulator.