The thesis focuses on the study of cognitive and communicative mechanisms of reference regulation in the English dialogic conversation.
Reference regulation occurs in dialogic interaction i.e. speech, characterized by the direct exchange of messages (conversational turns) by two or more speakers who are in the same situational conditions.
The analysis of polylogues, taken from the texts of modern British and American fiction, allowed distinguishing the linguocognitive operation of reference restructuring (at the microlevel of dialogic interaction in an adjacency pair) and linguistic cognitive operations of reference actualization, reactualization and blocking at the macrolevel of dialogic interaction (in two or more adjacency pairs).
All the communication participants usually are involved in the process of reference regulation. The degree of their involvement plays a key role in the dynamics of reference regulation. Therefore, a low degree of subjects’ involvement is characterized by conversational distancing (or even removal) from the object of speaker’s attention and self-removal of one of the communicants from a certain act of conversation or from communication in full. Reference blocking occurs when the degree of the participants’ involvement is the lowest.
The dynamics of reference regulation also depends on the relevance of referential code/suggested object of the speaker’s thought. The higher the degree of relevance is, the less cognitive effort communicants need to process the received information. Conversely, the lower the relevance of the provided information is, the greater the cognitive effort is required for its processing. The degree of relevance affects the effectiveness of communication and the realization of the participants’ intentions in the act of communication.
Emotivity plays an important role in the organization of reference and selection of language units that ensure the effectiveness of communication. The states in which the participants of communication are, vary from anger to cheerful mood. However, according to the results of our study, the reference regulation occurs more often when speakers are in a state of irritation, anger, rage, frustration.
The communicative strategies deployed by the subjects of reference regulation depend upon the participants’ pragmatic intentions. Consequently, communicants take advantage of cooperative, manipulative and non-cooperative strategies to regulate reference in the dynamics of their conversational interaction.
The process of reference regulation is influenced by the social, intellectual and psychological distance between interlocutors, which presupposes existence of two regulatory forces: harmonizing and agonal. The harmonizing function is related to the success of communication, because the speakers follow all the principles and rules of communicative interaction, the tone of communication is friendly. Both subjects of reference regulation realize their communicative intentions.
It is proved that reference regulation occurs in the situation of communicative triad (two participants of interaction and third party recipient (initiator of reference regulation)), communicative dyad (two participants of interaction, one of them transforms a phrase of another) and communicative monad (two participants of interaction, one of them initiates change the structure of his/her own message).
