Cognitive-Communicative Aspect of Expressing Indirect Evaluation in the English Dialogical Discourse

Abstract

This article focuses on expressing indirect positive and negative evaluation in the English dialogical discourse. The study is based on cognitive-communicative approach to the analysis of speech communication and also on the interpretation of the discourse as an integration of process (communicants’ intended mental-communicative activity) and result (a text produced by communicants during their communicative activity).
The dialogical discourse is recognized as the perfect and the most natural environment for speech
interaction of two communicants – the speaker and the addressee, each moulding the discourse in accord with the chosen communicative strategy and communicative tactics. In order to express (in)direct evaluation within the emotive-evaluative discourse, communicants use evaluative  communicative tactics: initiative – used by the speaker and reactive – used by the addressee. The identified corpus of evaluative communicative tactics used by each of the communicants within concrete dialogical discourses shows a considerable predominance of tactics to express and to react to indirect evaluation, both positive and negative, with the latter prevailing. In general, nine initiative communicative tactics used by the speaker to express indirect positive evaluation correspond to eight reactive communicative tactics used by the addressee to react to such evaluation, and ten initiative communicative tactics used by the speaker to express indirect negative evaluation correspond to the same quantity of reactive communicative tactics used by the addressee to react to such evaluation.