DISCOURSIVE STRATEGIES AND TACTICS OF NON-AUTHORITARIAN AND PESSIMISTIC LANGUAGE PERSONALITY (BASED ON O’HENRY’S SHORT STORIES)
The article focuses on the study of English linguistic personality at the 19th - the beginning of the 20th century as it is depicted by O’Henry in his short stories. It studies speech discursive and pragmatic peculiarities and strategies/tactics as а means of their implementation. The article provides an overview of ideas regarding non-authoritarian language personality definition, as well as determines various approaches to language personality classifications. The paper reveals and works out the typology of Вісник Запорізького національного університету № 1, 2016 219 characters’ language personalities and the criteria of their identification are established. Determined here are pragmatic, national and individual peculiarities in the speakers’ communicative and pragmatic activities. Special attention is paid to the way language means contribute to the representation of discursive strategies and tactics employed by the characters as authoritarian or non-authoritarian personality. The analysis of linguistic corpus highlights the key role оf English moral norms and nomism in discursive behaviour of linguistic personality realized by diverse language means. Revealed here are dominant values and national priorities typical of the English portrayed by O’Henry through the analysis of the verbal images used. Dominant values and pragmatic priorities of the Еnglish portrayed by O’Henry as well as the fragments of knowledge pertaining to the representatives of different speech subcultures are revealed through the analysis of the verbal images used. Communicative and pragmatic features of the characters’ speech in O’Henry’s short stories are determined by the specific repertory of discourse strategies intrigue and tactics employed by these characters. The article characterizes concealment strategy as well as convincing strategy and their tactics of the English speaking society. The concealment strategy depicts the complex of the language personality verbal activities targeted for own opinion suppression and answer omitting to avoid the opponents’ criticism. It is the most used strategy among non-authoritarian and pessimistic language personality. The speakers use such strategy in a way of counter-question, intrigue, answer omitting or contrivance. Convincing strategy displays the language personality verbal activities aimed to persuade the opponent in his verbal weakness, to provoke the self-pity and unwilling to continue the dispute. The analysis of speech realization of the verbal dominants helps to investigate the communicative and pragmatic stereotypes of English speaking society at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century.