DISCOURSIVE SPECIFICITY OF ENGINEERING COMMUNICATION IN THE RUSSIAN SOCIO-CULTURAL SPACE
The article discusses the communication specifics of engineering society in relation to the scientific discourse. It also studies the special features of the agent in the engineering communication as one of the key areas of modern life which provides the technological progress of industry as well as the research potential for education. The rise of the engineering professional society was due to the introduction and development of industry as a social force. 19th century introduced the position of the engineer which was strengthened in 20th century in the same way as the corporate societies of other specialists had been developed before. However, the corporate engineering society has not been studied yet either with the reflection of the professional image nor in the communication aspect. There are just few studies which consider the engineering communication as the texts of scientific and technical style but not as an independent object to be studied. The studies in the cognitive and discursive linguistics made the methodological basis of this paper including discourse analysis, scientific discourse studies, the research in functional linguistics and genre studies, the professional language and communication and the concept structure as well. The results were obtained by techniques of discourse analysis, textual, definition and component analysis as well as the qualitative evaluation of the associative dictionary data, the corpora analysis and the analysis of the search engine data. The materials included the encyclopaedia data, dictionaries, Russian National corpora, a body of technical standards. The paper solves the following issues: the boundaries of engineering communication as a certain discourse area, the description of key institutional parameters, the boundaries of engineering discourse against the scientific discourse: purpose, participants, the genre structure. Also, the key agent of the engineering communication was defined: the boundaries of the engineer concept, at which core the image of a specialist with a university degree is. The engineering definition is updated due to the complication and recent development of the engineering activity. The professional communication in engineering sphere traditionally regarded by Russian linguists as a part of the scientific discourse was identified as a separate institutional discourse based on certain compositionally crucial parameters.