“Increasing” and “decreasing” Communicative Influence Strategies in the Environmental Discourse Texts

Abstract

The article provides a concepts’ interpretation of the “decreasing” and “increasing” communication strategies. The types of corpora, their application in the linguistic sphere of scientific knowledge, and the differences between the corpora of three languages (English, Kazakh, and Russian) are analyzed in the article. The article describes the use of corpus linguistics for purposes of language features analysis and communication strategies identification in the process of creating speech messages. The article aims to analyze the communicative strategies of environmental discourse. The research is based on texts in three languages, represented in the iWeb English language corpus, the national corpus of the Russian language and the Almaty Corpus of the
Kazakh language. After the selection of utterances, a subsequent discursive and stylistic analysis of the selected fragments is performed with the aim of identifying examples of the dominant strategies and linguistic and stylistic means of their expression, as well as a data interpretation of the presented facts. The article focuses on the “increasing” and “decreasing” communicative influence strategies, which allowed us to select the following types of communication tactics: the tactics of analysis-plus, the promotion of activities aimed at protecting the nature and the environment, the bandwagon tactics, the tactics of rational argumentation in favor of environmental protection, the tactics of analysis-minus, the tactics of accusation, the tactics of impersonal accusation, the tactics of denunciation and the tactics of threat. The article provides examples of the authors' use of such communication tools with the allocation of the percentage of the most used strategies in each of the languages.