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FUNCTIONAL-PRAGMATIC FEATURES OF ASSESSMENT IN BUSINESS MEDIA DISCOURSE

Alexandra V. Radyuk, O. V. Guralnik

Abstract

English Business discourse is a unity of interrelated functional styles (registers) of speech used in business contexts. The register under investigation is the business press as it actualises one of the most important functions of discourse – the function of consciousness formation. Shaping the worldview, forming opinions and attitudes is currently on the global agenda as a point of contention in business, media, and political discourse. Pragmatic impact of mass media speech has attracted attention of researchers in semantics, stylistics, rhetoric, psychology, but still there is no unique taxonomy of discourse strategies of assessment in the business press. The purpose of this study is to show the importance of strategies of assessment as a tool of speech impact in media discourse, in shaping of public opinion on global political and economic issues. The material of the work is newspaper articles published on the official websites of BBC and the Economist. The authors use the method of functional-pragmatic analysis that reveals the relationship between extralinguistic aspects of communication and verbal side of speech, as well as methods of analysis and synthesis of the information received. The study identified the most productive tactics aimed at implementation of positive and negative strategies of assessment. Also the examples of implementation of these tactics to increase the pragmatic impact are provided. As a part of the study a corpus of examples of positive assessment strategy (tactic of praise, tactic of compliment, tactic of flattery) and the strategy of negative assessment (tactic of irony, tactic of sarcasm, tactic of condemnation) has been created. The article also provides a list of features typical for implementation of certain tactics of assessment: lexical means and grammatical characteristics. The study shows that the pragmatic impact in the business press is carried out through task-oriented organization of discourse in accordance with the set goal. The choice of speech means is carried out at the stage of speech planning; some general and specific means are used there (at discursive and lexical-grammatical level). Understanding of the cognitive-discursive processes of speech impact is the key to effective communication in business, commerce, journalism and other professional fields.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2019V/2.1/S10.023

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