Metacommunication in the context of speech influence optimisation

The present article focuses on studying metacommunication as a multi-dimensional self-reconfiguration endless symbolic process and its mechanisms of realising and optimising dynamic speech influence in German dialogue discourse within the anthropocentric framework of pragmalinguistics. Special emphasis has been laid on revealing the functional nature of metacommunication as phatic communication and as communication about communication, sustainably enhancing speech impact in a dialogue discourse environment. On the methodological basis of contextual, intentional, speech act and discursive implicature analyses the authors determine and define speech means that prove to be conducive to interlocutors’ succeeding in speech acts as perlocutionary optimisers. The research material is represented by fragments of the dialogue discourse containing such tools of perlocutionary optimisation, collected by continuous sampling from German works of literature, where characters’ speech is close to day-to-day conversational communication. The procedure of the given research comprised the analysis of discursive fragments in which the realisation of speech acts of various illocutionary types (potentially) results in communicative failures followed by studying metacommunicative utterances produced by the speaker to correct (or to prevent) the undesirable effects of his/her (potential) unsuccessful speech acts as perlocutionary optimisers. Realising the metacommunicative contactive speech act, they solve two blocks of tasks that contribute to the effective implementation of speech impact in the discourse: technically ensuring the uninterrupted flow of communication and additional intensifying the intended speech influence on the interlocutor, which is referred to as perlocutionary intensification. Based on this, the article offers a brief overview of the main technical tasks of perlocutionary optimisers, as well as a detailed analysis of the pragma-discursive features of perlocutionary intensifiers, namely: determining the way of their discursive realisation; distinguishing their pragmatic types depending on the object of influence; substantiating their position relative to other speech acts in verbal interaction, and describing the relevant situations of their functioning in the contemporary German dialogue discourse