Variativity of the Speaker’s Verbal and Non-verbal Behavior in the English Managerial Discourse

Abstract

Introduction. This paper focuses on the study of the verbal and non-verbal repertoire of the speaker changing his/her social roles in the managerial type of discourse in the psycholinguistic perspective. The ambition of this analysis is to regard the strategies and tactics of the social roles’ performance with the detailed psycholinguistic analysis of the verbal and non-verbal repertoire of the speakers. Taking into account a speaker’s mental representations, sociolinguistic characteristics, interpreted as a speaker’s social status and roles, and the communicative situation itself, the research purposes are to explore the influence of the managerial context of communication on the communicative repertoire of the speaker transitioning from a leadership role to a subordinate one or from a subordinate role to a leadership role; the analysis of the difference in the realization of the communicative strategies by the same speaker performing either a leadership role or a subordinate social role in the managerial discourse also presents the goal of this paper. Methods and procedure of research. The research is carried out on the basis of the analysis of 578 dialogical fragments from film scripts in which changing of social roles by a discursive personality in the managerial discourse is presented. The discursive analysis, contextual and situational analysis, pragma-linguistic analysis, and elements of quantitative calculations are used in the article. Results. The verbal and non-verbal repertoire of the realization of the strategies and tactics for the social roles performance in the managerial discourse are distinguished in the article. Their ratio is calculated in the research in order to display the most efficient ones for the successful role performance. The paper proves that the usage of stereotyped verbal and non-verbal models of communication in the managerial discourse contributes to the realization of the certain social role, and thus, to the achievement of the communicative goals. Conclusions. The hierarchization of status-role relations in the managerial discourse influences the speech repertoire of the speaker. This is reflected in the verbal and non-verbal means of implementing the strategies of dominance and subordination in the managerial discourse. A promising area of the research is connected with the studying of discursive variability of verbal and non-verbal communicative components which provide the social roles’ performance in the intercultural managerial discourse with considering the psycholinguistic peculiarities of the speaker.