The Thematic Control Strategy in the English Scientific Dialogue

Introduction. The article is about identifying the features of the implementation of the communicative strategy of theoretical control in scientific dialogue, the latter being considered as a special form of scientific discourse capable of borrowing elements of everyday communication (including both tactical and strategic features) due to its status of oral public speech. The strategy of thematic control plays a very important role in the tactical-and-strategic system of scientific dialogue and belongs to the so-called organizational/dialogical strategies (O.S. Issers). The relevance to establish the spectrum of tactics of thematic control as well as to identify the specifics of their implementation is predetermined by the necessity to solve both certain theoretical issues (e. g. the importance to identify and describe the nature of the phenomenon of “additional strategies” in various types of discourse) and practical tasks (the need to optimize communication of any kind, primarily in the field of science).

Methodology and sources. The methodological basis of the research is made up of the works by E.G. Zadvornaya, O.S. Issers, M.L. Makarov, T.A. van Dijk, H.P. Grice, M.T. Palmer, etc. devoted to the study of scientific dialogue. Transcripts of modern (no older than 2000) English scientific discussions of various thematic orientation have been used as a source of material. The research is based on both the contextual analysis (focusing on identifying the semantics of communicative units with respect to the conditions and circumstances of communication) and communicative-pragmatic analysis (aiming at identifying the pragmatic load of an utterance).

Results and discussion. The paper identifies a set of tactics that form the strategy of thematic control in scientific dialogue (introducing/declaring the topic of the discussion, developing / preserving the topic, and completing/finishing the topic, each of which is implemented through a number of techniques that can be both cooperative and non-cooperative, axiologically marked or axiologically neutral, stimulating or responsive. The results of the analysis may allow linguists to expand and deepen their understanding of the tactical and strategic system of dialogical forms of communication.

Conclusion. The conclusion about a certain variety of the thematic control tactics as well as about different roles of these tactics in promoting speech interaction in scientific dialogue has been made.

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