PERSUASION AND REQUEST AS COMMUNICATIVE TACTICS FOR KEEPING SECRETS IN ENGLISH FICTIONAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

This research is dedicated to the study of the tactics of persuasion and request as those that help the speaker preserve a secret. In recent years, only a few studies have been devoted to the pragmatic and linguistic features of discussing secrets. The existing research on how people discuss their own and other people’s secrets has been carried out mainly in the field of sociolinguistics.The linguistic side of the verbalisation of secrets remains understudied.Similarly, there are no studies of the pragmatic aspect of discussing secrets.Considering these existing lacunas, the present research on the pragmatic aspect of communicating secrets seems relevant. The purpose of the study is to describe persuasion and request as communicative tactics for keeping secrets in fictional discourse. Persuasion is defined as a process in which the speaker tries to persuade the addressee to change his or her attitude towards a particular issue or change his or her behaviour in relation to a particular problem. A request, in contrast, is seen as a polite appeal to the interlocutor to get the addressee to perform a certain action. As a result of the study, we have discovered that in terms of pragmatics, the tactics of persuasion and request differ from each other, as persuasion is performed through manipulation and psychological pressure, while the request is realised through the strategies of mitigation, softening, conventional strategies, and politeness. Correspondingly, the lexical, grammatical, and stylistic means of implementing these tactics differ significantly. Persuasion is characterised by the use of intensifying particles, lexical repetition, elliptical sentences, cleft sentences, rhetorical questions, and detachments. Requests are characterised by the following means: the adverb “please”, modal adverbs ‘just’ and “possibly”, euphemisms, deintensifiers/downtoners (at all, a bit), conditionals, tag questions, modal constructions, etc. Thus, persuasion contains elements of psychological pressure on the interlocutor, so the language means are more expressive and intense. The request is implemented through means that are aimed at softening the request and reducing its categorical nature because the speaker wishes to be polite and not put his or her own image at risk. The perspective of the research is to expand the practical material, as well as to study the tactics of advice and warning used to preserve secrets.