Epistemic Words and Communicative Strategies of Cooperation

Abstract

The article examines epistemic words in discourse in order to determine their significance for the formation of communicative strategies of cooperation. Epistemic words (e.g. know, think, perhaps) convey the speaker’s attitude to what is said, express the level of knowledge about what is said, which can vary from confidence to uncertainty. The pragmatics of epistemic words is superimposed on the functioning of dialogic discourse. The main task of pragmatics is to show what the speaker or character wants to convey with his statements, while the communicative-functional direction of speech research aims to plan the speech process depending on the circumstances and conditions of communication and personalities of communicators to achieve communication goals. Communicative strategies and tactics are a method of expressing the intentions of the speaker and influence on the interlocutor. It is common to divide strategies into strategies of cooperation and confrontation. Cooperation strategies are based on the concept of “balance of relations” between communicators, the positive mood between them and their desire to achieve the communicative goal. It is the communicative strategies of cooperation and tactics of cooperative communication that are the subject of research, and the object of research are fragments of dialogic discourse that contain epistemic words. The material for the study were works of modern English literature. In the article for the global strategy of cooperation we single out local strategies for ensuring stable and harmonious communication, prompting, presentation of information, empathy, positive evaluation. It was found that the strategy of stable and harmonious communication is manifested through tactics of seeking consent, confirmation, assurance, promise, justification; prompting strategy includes tactics of instructions, advice, requests; presentation strategy includes the tactics of statement, argumentation, summarizing, assuming, predicting, explaining, clarifying; the strategy of empathy is realized through tactics of encouragement and consolation; the strategy of positive evaluation is implemented through tactics of compliment and praise.