Communicating recipient’s emotions: Text-triggered interest

Abstract

The article aims to expand the scope of interpersonal pragmatics and deals with the issue of ‘recipient’s emotions’ which is the least developed area of communication research into emotions. The authors promote the sociopragmatic conception of emotional processes and highlight the strategic nature of emotional impact in communicative situations. The study focuses on the analysis of emotion-evocative communication in terms of the reader’s emotional interest with reference to expository texts from Russian school textbooks. The main purpose of the study is to identify how the strategic use of language increases text-triggered interest. In order to achieve this purpose, the study applies not only linguistic methods intended to explore the strategic manner of language usage, but also experimental methods intended to verify a possible emotional impact. The linguistic analysis reveals that there are three main ways the strategic use of language increases text-triggered interest: expression of dialogicity, concretisation, and manifestation of emotions. The experimental results prove their provoking functions and demonstrate a leading role of linguistic-based factors in interest-evocative communication. The study suggests that the recipient’s interest is often provoked by text-based factors, and text-triggered interest is dependent on the linguistic structure of the discourse. The linguistic strategies used to increase text-triggered interest might be treated as a foundation for different interest-evoking strategies and as a discursive dimension of the recipient’s interest.

Keywords

• emotions in communication
• pragmatics
• expository text
• text comprehension
• linguistics of emotions