The thesis presents the study of nominative, communicative, and pragmatic aspects of the speaker’s tactile behaviour in the English fictional discourse. The thesis regards the speaker’s tactile behaviour as one or more nonverbal physical contact actions (touches), performed by speakers with their hands or other body parts, pragmatically and functionally loaded in view of lingual and extralingual features of the communicative moment. The study analyses existing cultural, social, psychological, and communicative classifications of touches, as well as elaborates the semiotic one, which distinguishes five groups of touches: emblems, illustrators, regulators, tactile emotional expressions and tactile adaptors each having its specific functions and communicative potential within the speakers’ semiotic interaction. The thesis uses a range of the relevant methods to analyse means designating the speaker’s (the character’s) tactile behaviour in the English fictional discourse. Applying the modular method, the study employs the tacesic module as its basic structural unit, defined as a part of the contemporary English fictional discourse containing at least one nomination of touch. The typology of tacesic modules considers nominative, locative, functional and modus criteria. In the contemporary English fictional discourse the components of tacesic modules, i.e. the subject of touch, the instrument of touch, the object of touch, the tactile action and contact, active and passive tactile experience, as well as tactile interaction of the speakers are mainly verbalized by means of tacesic words (words naming touch) belonging to different parts of speech. The study reveals that the combination of tacesic and other nonverbal modules is influenced by both external and internal factors. The former include the directivity factor, the harmony factor and the equilibrium factor, the latter being manifested in a specific interplay of the key parameters of the speaker’s nonverbal signals, verbalized in the fictional discourse. The thesis covers the issue of pragmatic functions served by tacesic nominations. There are six of them including cognitive, deictic, adaptive, regulatory, emotive and illocutionary functions. The study reveals that the speakers of different communicative styles demonstrate different tactile behaviour models from the point of view of fascination.
