Structural and semantic models of threat utterances in the modern English dialogical discourse

Abstract

The article deals with the establishment of structural and semantic models of utterances that express threatening speech acts in the modern English dialogical discourse. The threat is considered as a hybrid speech act, which is an intermediate link between the directive and the commissive. It combines the features of two illocutionary types, combining two equal inherent components of the illocutionary force – directive (the requirement of the addressee to carry out a certain action) and commissive (obligation of the speaker to perform some act against the addressee’s interests in the future in case of non-fulfillment of the requirement) illocutions. The directive component is predetermined by the perlocutionary purpose of the speaker to force the addressee to perform a certain act, and the commissive one is expressed in the proposition by the speaker's obligation to perform an act that may result in adverse consequences for the addressee. In the English dialogic discourse, nine groups of structural and semantic models of threatening speech acts expression are distinguished: 1) directive and commissive components are expressed non-verbally; 2) directive and commissive component are expressed explicitly; 3) directive and commissive components are expressed implicitly; 4) directive component is expressed explicitly, commissive component is expressed implicitly; 5) directive component is expressed implicitly, and commissive – explicitly; 6) directive component is expressed explicitly, and commissive – non-verbally; 7) directive component is expressed implicitly, and commissive – non-verbally; 8) directive component is expressed nonverbally, and commissive – implicitly; 9) directive component is expressed non-verbally, and the commissive one is expressed explicitly. The most frequent is the 3rd group, which implies the implicit expression of the directive and commissive components.