Factors of Pragmatic, Cognitive, and Structural Relevance of Components Within Question-Answer Complexes in Modern Political Discourse

The article aims to reveal the linguistic, communicative, and pragmatic sequences of questions and answers in a dialog identity, discover the specifics in the process of their modeling, describe the features of the communicants' speech behavior in the oral use of discourse. The focus is the analysis of the minimal structures of the question-answer complex (QAC) that implement the purpose semantics in the direction of searching information about the target event, revealing the action purposiveness, identifying its subject, as well as generating and explicating the required information in the genre of political interviews by more or less typical linguistic means that have communicative significance. The preference - the key concept in this research - determined the direction of linguistic thought: to designate the preferred linguistic means in the situation of revealing information about the target event and its aspects (resources, subjects), to find their preferred second parts - conversational turns that correspond to the linguistic and cognitive aspects of the purpose statement explication, to explain some conditions that determine the choice of preferred/non-preferred options for the second component of the sequence of questions and answers in a dialogue. Using methods of introspection, observation on textual example and process of developing dialogue, based on a continuous sampling from transcripts of interviews with political leaders, the author identified sequences of questions and answers with the purpose semantics and analyzed them from the viewpoint of cognitive prerequisites to explicate the answer (the addressee's perception, understanding, and interpretation of questions), the material realization of the judgment (factors of choosing the grammatical form), and pragmatic communication conditions in quantitative and qualitative aspects. The author revealed conditions that form the discursive environment (the sphere of the text units' functioning including the form of discourse, type, genre, specificity of communicants - role, status, attitudes towards communication, audience, etc.) as typical for the explication of purpose judgments, the trigger of which is the questions “why?”, “for what?”. As an indicator of semantics, these questions regulate the modality of communication, determine the illocutionary force of the response, thereby stimulating the formation of adjacent pairs - minimal structures within the QAC - the object of this research. The realization of a situational approach to the analysis of speech interaction in the genre of political interviews, as well as the recognition of the leading role of the social context, which determines the semantic representation of the question by the addresser and the clarification of its semantics by the addressee, made it possible to detect the factors that determine the generation of a response - objective (linguistic, grammatical) and subjective (cognitive-pragmatic order). The author found that the degree of contiguity of pairs within the sequence of questions and answers in a dialogue always marks the peculiarities of the addressee's perception of the question, its understanding, interpretation and subsequent explication, and is coherent with the local (linear arrangement of components), situational (speech interaction of communicants), and linguistic (“lexico-grammatical packaging”) aspects of communication.

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