Levels of Communication Act: Functional Communicative Features of Social Work Institutional Discourse

Abstract

The article studies basic functional communicative features of social work discourse. Assuming the actualization of triple communication bonds “a social worker – a client – a social service” in social work interaction, the authors study the key levels of communicative actions, which verbalize both institutional and personal elements in this communication domain. The approach provides an opportunity to specify social work discourse as a contaminated phenomenon combining the features of a social-ritual kind within the institutional type of discourse and an existential kind within personality-oriented type of discourse. The linguistic means of actualizing conventional components of this type of discourse are determined.