SELF-PRESENTATION AS A MEANS OF REALIZING SYNERGETIC GLOBAL STRATEGIES OF APPROACHING AND DISTANCING IN THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE DISCOURSE

Abstract

Self-presentation strategic aspect, as noted in the humanitarian studies including linguistics, is addressed in the paper in terms of the notion of discursive strategy. This gives grounds to define SELF-PRESENTATION as a local strategy of the English-language discourse. Like other local strategies SELF-PRESENTATION is represented by a number of speech strategies (metaspeech, informative, evaluative) and tactics. The specific feature of SELF-PRESENTATION is its ability to take part in the realization of a number of global discourse task and accordingly to correlate with a number of global discoursive strategies, APPROACHING and DISTANCING among them.

These strategies are based on such conceptual structures as concept and anti-concept which together form the metaconcept DISTANCE. The actual conceptual knowledge proper to these structures integrates with that represented by the metaconcept INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS, embracing the concept COOPERATION and the anti-concept CONFRONTATION. This results in producing several configurations of the concepts and anti-concepts which form the basis for the global strategies of COOPERATIVE APPROACHING, CONFRONTATIONAL APPROACHING, COOPERATIVE DISTANCING, CONFRONTATIONAL DISTANCING. The integration of the conceptual structures reveals the synergetic nature of the strategies under study.

SELF-PRESENTATION as a local strategy of the English-language discourse in employed in the realization of the COOPERATIVE APPROACHING global strategy. For this purpose metaspeech self-presentemes, informative self-presentemes and their combinations are used. SELF-PRESENTATION local strategy also takes part in the implementation of the global strategies of COOPERATIVE DISTANCING and CONFRONTATIONAL DISTANCING. For this purpose the self-presentemes of the informative type are mainly employed.

Thus SELF-PRESENTATION as a local strategy takes part in achieving such global aims as COOPERATIVE APPROACHING which means shorting the social distance between the communicants with positive or neutral effect on their interpersonal relations and COOPERATIVE or CONFRONTATIONAL DISTANCING which is meant to broaden the social distance between the communicants with positive / neutral or negative effect on their interpersonal relations. The analysis of SELF-PRESENTATION possible correlations with other global strategies of the English-language discourse seems promising.