Pragmatic function of an emotive component in the communicative field of persuasion

Modern linguistics is concerned with emotional sphere of language/speech, it is thus particularly relevant to investigate the role played by emotions in the organisation of a goal-oriented human's behaviour. Whereas speech acts realising imperative meaning are mainly aimed at the regulation of behaviour, it is interesting to study the pragmatic function of emotive units in a situation of persuasion and to choose emotionally marked (emotive) imperative utterances as an object of research. An integrating attribute to structures of such kind, represented by the communicative field of the emotive category intersecting with the communicative field of persuasion characterises the polyintentionality (combination of several illocutionary goals) and differentiates the perlocutionary effect. The scientific significance of such research is in focusing attention on the analysis of the perlocutionary acts interacting with illocutionary ones: the illocutionary phase is treated as verbalisation of imperative intention, the perlocutionary one is defined by the efficiency of impact reached by including emotive units in the structure of persuasion. Such aspect differentiation presupposes complex analysis of the emotive situation of persuasion: identification of speech intention specifics, language means of its translation, specifics of perception and interpretation by an addressee of the addresser's communicative intention. In this context the realisation of the pragmatic mechanism of an emotive component in an imperative utterance may be dealt with in terms of linguistic persuasion, aimed at achieving the perlocutionary effect and presented as a row of pragmatic strategies. As a foundation to the latter we consider the following criteria: 1) the method of expression of communicative intention (explicit, implicit); 2) the degree of intensity in expressing persuasive intention. Considering the first criterion we may identify three types of strategies: 1) the strategy of emotional will expression, which is characterised by an explicit method of expressing persuasion; 2) the strategy of expressing emotional state and 3) the strategy of expressing emotional relation where the mechanisms of implicit expression of persuasive meaning are available. The second criterion (degree of intensity in expressing communicative intention) determines the strategy of communication process regulation, which is preconditioned by addressee's intention to control the addresser's behaviour in order to realize the persuasive intention, characterised by modification of the persuasive situation and manifested in its communicative pragmatic variants.

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