Contact-Maintaining Metacommunicative Listener Questions in Modern English Dialogic Discourse
Contact-Maintaining Metacommunicative Listener Questions in Modern English Dialogic Discourse

Summary/Abstract: The paper focuses on revealing the mechanisms of maintaining spoken interaction by means of the metacommunicative listener questions in modern English dialogic discourse. The pragmatic and discursive properties of metacommunicative questions functioning at the contact-maintaining stage of the communicative act are singled out. The typology of contact-maintaining metacommunicative listener questions in modern English dialogic discourse is proposed. Contact-maintaining metacommunicative questions are viewed as a specifically oriented functional class of speech units bound by a common communicative purpose, i. e., they aim to control the communicative activity of the interlocutor, regulate the thematic and expressive components of the communicative situation, and to change the interpersonal relations of communication partners, thereby influencing the flow of interaction.

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