Emotive Pragmatics of Popularisation Discourse: The Impact of Contextualisation on Reader’s Interest

Abstract

The paper adheres to the pragmatic approach to emotion processes and focuses on emotion-evocative communication. Its goal is to investigate the impact of contextualisation techniques, which employed by popularisation discourse to induce readers' interest. The research is carried out in two ways, discourse-pragmatic and experimental. First, by adopting the sociopragmatic view of emotions and using methods of discourse analysis, the paper fleshes out a model of emotion-evocative communication, outlines contextualisation techniques, and introduces text materials. Second, by representing the experimental study, the paper assesses the interest-evoking effect of contextualisation. The experimental study involved 400 undergraduate students. We employed the scaling method (7-point bipolar scales) to measure participants' attitude to generalised and contextualised text passages. The data analysis applied the Wilcoxon test, the Kolmogorov – Smirnov test, Spearman's correlation coefficient, the linear regression, and the explanatory factor analysis. The comparing tests reveal that contextualisation promotes reader's interest in the popularisation text. The findings suggest that contextualisation techniques make the text content more relevant to the reader. Personal relevance – as a kind of mediator – causes interest responses. Beyond that, it was found that that reader's expectations about text strategies to presents knowledge construct interest-evocative communication. The findings demonstrate how communicative variables combine into the model of emotion-evocative communication.