Pragmatics of Communicative Tonality in Prohibiting Acts in English Educative Converse

Abstract

Communicative tonality is introduced in terms of the utterance style that expresses the speaker’s opinion on the topic, assessment of interpersonal relations with the partner, in a pair with self-presentation in converse acts. It specifies the utterance proposition with the language means that are to transfer thoughtful, contemptuous, adverse, facetious, ironical, other emotional shades of speech. The research explores the notion of communicative tonality and methodology of its study in the theory of discourse and Cross-Cultural communication; examines the communicative tonality of prohibition as an aspect of pragmatic stylistics of communication; specifies its linguistic means in English-related tradition of educative converse. We propose that communicative tonality in the situation of prohibition is stylistically flexible and assembles symbolic obstacles or restrictions in a child’s conduct. Aimed at educative socializing goals, in traditional English converse communicative tonality of prohibition is characterized by dynamic unity of prohibiting genre conventions with paternalism and/or liberal-and-democratic mitigation tactics or authoritative intensification, variability of direct and indirect volition pressure acts. Mitigation in prohibition is achieved with modal verbal predicates and conditional syntactic constructions of utterances that are used by adults to explain reasons of banning or refusal. Signifying the status, the adult gives reasonable arguments, describes psychological states of sadness or disappointment. The alternations of thoughtful and friendly tonality make provision for variability of vertical and horizontal vectors of social distance while communicating with a child. Intensification of authoritativeness is marked by speech acts of strict banning, refusal, objections, which point to vertical vector of excessive control.