REGULAR AND DISCOURSE-SPECIFIC ENGLISH METACOMMUNICATION: PROBLEM STATEMENT

Abstract

The article identifies “regular and discourse-specific metacommunication”; notably, it observes metacommunication as a pragmatic and cognitive phenomenon. It indicates the main criterion used in the metacommunication typology, which is metapragmatic awareness and the ways of its realization. The research establishes that regular metacommunication is an explicit reflection of what is going on in real communication; consequently, it bases on regular stereotypic patterns used in (almost) all discourse types and shaped in accordance with the norms of the speech genres they belong to. It characterizes autonomous meta-means as regular, explicit, contextually independent, highly conventionalized, semantically empty, and stereotypic lexicon, which have been classified into six main groups: phatic, regulative, referential, reflective, cohesive and modal. The article confirms that the most widespread regular meta-means are phatic, regulative, and reflective, while modal ones are the least frequent. It also demonstrates that pragmatic intentions of the speaker realize through the choice of stereotypic clichés, typical for a certain discourse type (everyday, law, media, rhetoric, academic or scientific), and viewed as discourse-specific meta-means. In the context of the discourse-analysis of English metacommunication, the author enlightens that the above-mentioned discourse types have been selected by speech genres criterion, as speech genres, classified according to the traditional functional styles (oral, academic, official, social-political etc.) are, in terms of discourse studies, now equalled to discourse types. The study specifies that discourse-specific meta-means are also frequently used but only within certain discourse type; thus, they have been defined as “regular meta-means of certain discourse type”. It proves that “most metacommunicative” are oral media and rhetoric discourses, and the lowest meta-index is in law discourse; in all discourses under analysis, but for everyday one, most frequently used are regulative meta-means, while the everyday discourse has been characterized as phatic.