Boboshko T. Estimative Responsive Utterances in Modern English: Communicative, Pragmatic, and Functional Characteristics (in the American and British fiction of the early 21st сentury).

The thesis focuses on determining, classifying and analysing communicative, pragmatic, and functional characteristics of estimative responsive utterances (ERUs) in modern American and British fiction. The theoretical basis of the investigation integrates main principles of modern pragmalinguistics, communicative, and functional linguistics, speech acts theory, and discourse theory. The thesis employs a set of general research and specific linguistic methods, i.e. description, as well as pragmatic, discourse, structural and functional, contextual, quantitative analyses. Chapter One, "Theoretical and methodological principles of the analysis of the addressee's estimative utterances", critically summarizes the results of the previous studies of such utterances. It considers methodology of the dialogical discourse study and theoretical principles of the estimation research in the linguistic aspect. Developed here is the method of the ERU analysis from the communicative, pragmatic, and functional viewpoints. The estimation is defined as a pragmatic and semantic category, represented by estimative linguistic devices at all speech levels conveying positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent speaker's attitude to the message content and aiming at expressing a certain communicative intention and achieving some perlocutionary effect. The estimative responsive utterance (ERU) is an estimative speech act that serves as the result of the influence of the initial utterance and simultaneously represents the intention concerning the interlocutor.