Non-cooperative strategies in American political dialogic discourse (based on the press briefing genre)

The article presents results of analyzing the strategic dimension of dialogic discourse, with focus on non-cooperative communicative strategies employed by dialogue participants. The term “non-cooperative strategy” in this study is defined in a broad sense, namely, as a communicative strategy associated with a violation of principles underlying successful communicative cooperation, but not necessarily related to hostile rhetoric. In the present research, identifying non-cooperative strategies was based on Grice’s cooperative principle and Leech’s politeness principle. The analysis of dialogic discourse relied on Baranov and Kreydlin’s concept of illocutionary neces-sitation which characterizes the relationship between utterances in a dialogue and suggests distinguishing between necessitating and necessitated dialogue utterances. Transcripts of press briefings held by Donald Trump and members of the Coronavirus Task Force in April 2020 were used as data for the research. A total of 10 press briefing transcripts were analyzed. The relevance of the study is due to the trend towards “legitimization” of verbal aggression, noted by some researchers of American political discourse. The article describes the most representative non-cooperative strategies revealed in the discourses under analysis, namely shifting the topic, logorrhea, ignoring, accusation, biting remark, reproach, control over the situation, delegitimization and objection. The study found that the functioning of some of the described strategies has a specific limitation in terms of the utterance type. Thus, the strategies of shifting the topic, ignoring and objection are confined to a necessitated utterance, while the strategies of accusation, biting remark, reproach, control over the situation and delegitimization can be implemented in both necessitating and necessitated utterances. Based on this finding, it is proposed to distinguish between bound and free non-cooperative strategies in dialogic discourse. The results of the study enrich the theory of dialogue by suggesting a typology of strategies for non-cooperative dialogic interaction based on the notion of illocutionary necessitation. Further scientific inquiry into communicative strategies in dialogic discourse will allow clarifying and expanding the conclusions drawn about the functional dependence of dialogic discourse strategies on the utterance type and about the possibility of distinguishing between bound and free strategies in dialogic interaction. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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