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Grineva M.S. [Metacommunicative means of managing empathetic and harmonious communicative tonality in therapeutic discourse (in English and Russian languages)] World of Science. Series: Sociology, Philology, Cultural Studies, 2021, Vol. 12, No. 4. Available at: https://sfk-mn.ru/PDF/57FLSK421.pdf (in Russian).

Metacommunicative means of managing empathetic and harmonious communicative tonality in therapeutic discourse (in English and Russian languages)

Grineva Maria Sergeevna
Kaluga State University named after K.E. Tsiolkovski, Kaluga, Russia
E-mail: mariagrineva@mail.ru
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1642-6693
RSCI: https://elibrary.ru/author_profile.asp?id=825490

Abstract. The article is devoted to the study of pragmatic functions of counselling psychologist’s metacommunicative utterances aimed at managing cooperative communicative tonality in therapeutic discourse. In the overview the notions of metacommunication and metadiscourse are clarified; the role of metacommunication in asymmetrical professional communication is determined based on counselling psychologist — client communication during a therapy session; the notion of communicative tonality and its variations is discussed. The author concludes that during a therapy session the interpersonal relationship between the counselling psychologist and the client as well as the counselling psychologist’s professional linguistic identity are being constructed at the metadiscursive level. The focus of the analysis is to identify the functional variations of counselling psychologist’s metacommunicative utterances aimed at establishing and maintaining empathetic and harmonious tonality and to describe their verbal markers in English- and Russian-language therapy sessions. Based on the analysis of 145 transcripts of authentic English- and Russian-language therapy sessions it is found that during a therapy session the counselling psychologist seeks to establish and maintain empathetic and harmonious communicative tonality by using metacommunicative utterances. Empathetic tonality accompanies the counselling psychologist reflecting the client’s emotions and thoughts and thus can be divided into affective and cognitive. Metacommunicative utterances of affective empathetic tonality include performative expressions of sympathy, commiseration, and shared joy. Cognitive empathetic tonality is verbalized metacommunicatively through performative expressions of understanding. Harmonious tonality is directed at expressing solidarity with the client and is marked metacommunicatively by performative and non-performative expressions of agreement/acknowledgement, refraining from confrontation, complimentary utterances (expressions of praise and positive evaluation of the client’s speech utterances) and manifestations of dialogic politeness. Metacommunicative utterances of empathetic and harmonious tonality can be used as hedging devices for counselling psychologist’s critical remarks (doubt, disagreement, objection, etc.) and function as disclaimers. In case the critical remark negates the perlocutionary effect of the disclaimer, it acquires a non-cooperative character and conveys pseudo-empathetic or pseudo-harmonious tonality. The author also arrives at the conclusion that metacommunicative means of managing empathetic and harmonious tonality in English- and Russian-language therapeutic discourse have a relatively universal character.

Keywords: metacommunication; metadiscourse; metacommunicative utterance; metacommunicative marker; communicative tonality; professional discourse; professional linguistic identity; therapeutic discourse; empathetic tonality; harmonious tonality

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