Pakharenko A. Child as an authoritarian discursive personality (based on the modern English language)

The object-matter of this dissertation is verbal, nonverbal, and superverbal communicative components, which a child applies to produce his own authoritarian speech, and the subject-matter is their specific features in the authoritarian discourse of children. The thesis aims at a thorough analysis of the specifics of the child discursive personality’s communicative behavior in certain communicative contexts with account for the age and pragmatic parameters of the addressee. The major scientific methods are discourse analysis, contextual, pragma-semantic, structural semantic, and intent analysis. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the fact that the authoritarian discourse of children is singled out among other types of discourse; the results of a linguistic analysis of an authoritarian child’s communicative behavior are presented; the authoritarian strategies and tactics are characterized; specific features of the interaction of verbal and nonverbal communicative components in the authoritarian discourse of children while implementing the authoritarian strategies and tactics are traced. The theoretical value of the paper is dependent on the fact that outlining the notion of the authoritarian discourse of children and special features of its structural, semantic, and linguopragmatic organization is a contribution to discourse theory and theory of communication. The applied value of the results obtained is determined by the prospects of their application in the courses of theoretical grammar of the English language (chapter “Pragmatics”, “Syntax”), communication studies, general linguistics (chapter “Language and Society”), in optional courses on nonverbal communication, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, and also in research papers by undergraduate students, as well as in PhD research.