LINGUO-PROSODIC MEANS OF POLITENESS/ IMPOLITENESS REALIZATION IN ENGLISH INFORMAL CONFLICT DIALOGICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The immediate aim of the article is to define linguo-prosodic means of politeness/impoliteness realization in English informal conflict dialogiсal discourse. The article examines the functioning of prosody as a means of implementing politeness/ impoliteness in conflict discourse depending on the degree of its formality, which highlights the general relevance of the topic. The analysed informal conflict dialogical units were subdivided into polite and impolite. Thus, in this work we investigate 2 types of informal conflict dialogical units: polite informal and impolite informal. The basic type of informal conflict situations, touching collucutors’ personal life, their family relations, is a family conflict, developing in three major directions: parents — children; husband — wife; brother/sister — brother/sister. Conflicts between family members can take different scenarios depending on inner family relations of conflicting sides. Most frequently conflicts occur between children and parents and between married couples. The main purpose of parents is to make their children change direction of their actions according to their (parents’) ideas and interests. Parents do their best to save asymmetrical correlation of their role and their children’s role within a family, as such placing of roles gives them advantage in realization of their aims. Parents make ample use of orders, prohibitions, threats, reproaches, etc. Children’s communicative strategy in such conflict situations is conditioned by a strong desire to make their family role as important as their parents’ one. The most frequent conflict reasons within a family is violation of both family and social obligations by one or both partners. The most frequent reason of conflict in siblings’ relations is their struggle for personal interests or space; envy; one of the conflict-creating factors is their desire to prove their social importance to each other. On the whole, in impolite informal conflict intercourse the conduct of spouses depends a great deal on their social status and education. Low social status married couples in most cases do not control their emotions, do not think about the conflict consequences, do not try to keep a wife (husband) away from undesirable stresses. In some occasions high social status married couples were characteristic of arrogance, snobbery, scorn, that resulted in aggressive verbal conduct during a conflict. Impolite informal conflict cooperation between brothers and sisters is also characteristic of high emotionality degree. Collocutors do not hide their negative feelings and emotions, are not afraid to talk unpleasant, rough and abusive things. At prosodic level it is expressed by high volume and quick speech tempo, as communication participants speak very quickly; although their speech slows down on semantically and emphatically important areas of the dialogue, i. e. semantically and emphatically important remarks are foregrounded via their prolonging. The conducted research enabled the followings conclusions: English informal conflict dialogiсal discourse is characteristic of using verbal aggression techniques; foul, sometimes even taboo, language; simple syntactic constructions; ellipsis; direct imperative constructions. At prosodic level distinctive features of informal conflict dialogues can be named rapid tempo (often with a tendency to normal), high volume, wide voice range, use of the broken descending scale and the high-falling nuclear tone. The collocutor’s conduct in conflict communication depends a great deal on their social status, education and politeness.