POLYTOPICALITY AS A FACTOR OF TOPIC RECONTEXTUALIZATION

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of the object of the speaker’s thought recontextualization caused by the polytopicality of communication. The communicative interaction in the presence of the permanent object of the speaker’s thought is defined as monotopical. Guided by the communicative initiative, the speaker determines the topical field for the implementation of the subsequent speech actions of communicative partners. The dynamic nature of context models presupposes constant modifications in the process of speech interaction between communicators. Functional reorientation of the object of the speaker’s thought accompanied by the qualitative and quantitative rearrangement in the structure of context models is described as recontextualization. Reference has been made to the fluctuation of the object of the speaker’s thought, that is the coexistence of two or more objects of the speaker’s thought, that determines the polytopicality of communication. Communicative partners’ speech actions, often unrelated when introducing the new object of the speaker’s thought, form the potential polytopic field of the communicative interaction. It has been revealed that dynamic polytopic interaction is characterized by the transformation of the initial object of the speaker’s thought into potential ones, the change of context models of communicators, the emergence of new perspectives on the topic under discussion, that is reperspectivation, which is often of unpredictable and conflicting character. The factors that together cause the polytopicality of communication have been singled out, such as the epistemic factor (the presence of intellectual distance), the affective factor (the presence of psychological distance), the factor of redistribution of communicative roles (the transition of the communicative initiative from the speaker to the addressee) and the factor of the side-recipient who changes his status to the active reagent. Attention has been focused on verbal and non-verbal means of explication of polytopicality which signal the perspective reorientation of the object of the speaker’s thought in course of communicative interaction, «layering» of communicative partners’ perspectives on the topic under discussion and, consequently, testify to the multiperspectivity of the communicative process.