PRAGMATIC FUNCTIONS OF TACESIC NOMINATIONS IN ENGLISH LITERARY DISCOURSE

Abstract

Nonverbal communication enables people to convey a significant amount of information, which allows them to be considered as an integral and equal, along with verbal communication, component of the communicative act. The universality of nonverbal communication, its permanence and presence in almost any field of activity make it crucial both in life and in literature, as the authors of the latter in their works imitate communication in real life. Every facial expression and every gesture help to convey the general meaning of the utterance, and therefore, it can be argued that body language accompanies every speech act, and even if a person does not speak, one’s nonverbal behavior constantly conveys information that may make sense. In modern researches, there is a tendency to consider nonverbal components of communication as functionally necessary components of a literary work. Touch is the primary means of understanding the world through physical contact with it, which is provided by the differentiated nature of tactile modality defined as a perceptual system mediated by skin and kinesthetic afferent subsystems. The study identified six pragmatic functions of touch nominations in a communicative act: deictic, adaptive, regulatory, emotional, illocutionary and cognitive. The deictic function of tacesic nominations is performed out in the social, spatial and personal plans of deixis; the adaptive function of nominations to denote the tactile behavior of the character is realized through their ability to express the bodily needs of the communicator; the regulatory function is manifested in the ability of such nominations to manage the discourse in the phases of establishing, maintaining and opening the communicative contact of literary characters; emotional function is revealed in their potential to transmit hedonic emotional coloring and intensify verbally expressed emotional manifestations; the illocutionary function is determined by their ability to realize pragmatic content, primarily of a directive and expressive nature; cognitive function is justified by the fact that such nominations become indicators of cognitive and intellectual activity of the literary character.