Conceptualizing emotions through discourse: a pragmatic view on the reader's interest

Abstract

The paper adopts a sociopragmatic approach to the study of emotion processes and investigates discursive traits of the reader’s interest. The field of written popularization was examined to establish how it conceptualizes the reader’s interest through discourse structures. The text materials were obtained experimentally. They consist of 104 pairs of expository text; each of the pairs includes a text published in an academic source and a popular science text created by the participant for provoking the reader’s interest. The comparative methods of empirical discourse analysis are used to identify and describe popularisation strategies. The results show that participants employed four strategies to transform academic texts: reduction N = 94), simplification (N = 81), contextualization (N = 58), and concrete elaboration (N = 17). The strategies tend to present the most significant text ideas, reduce reader’s efforts for processing, and introduce the reader into the discourse-world. The findings suggest that the strategies aim to enhance the optimal relevance and conceptualize reader’s interest through the communicative dimension of relevance.

Keywords

• emotion
• reader’s interest
• emotive pragmatics
• popularization
• expository text
• relevance