THE COMMUNICATIVE SITUATION OF TEMPTATION: THE MECHANISM OF COGNITIVE AND PRAGMATIC INTERACTION IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE CINEMATIC DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article focuses on the dialectical unity of cognitive and communicative nature of temptation in the modern English cinematic discourse. The investigation defines the concept of temptation along with the needs controlling the communicative behavior of the participants; determines the specific features of the communicative situation under analysis; characterizes its components and their interdependencies in both cognitive and verbal dimensions.

Temptation is considered to be a social process, a kind of regulatory speech action actualized as provocative communication in the form of demonstrating the attractor in order to impel to perform actions beneficial for the tempter but contradicting the victim’s belief system. Temptation is thought to be a success in case of suppressing the victim’s belief system due to the high value of the attractor as well as through the efficient communicative activity of the tempter.

The ambivalence of victim’s needs is the major identifying feature of the communicative situation of temptation. The essence of temptation consists in simultaneous actualization of both completely opposite, but directly relating needs of achievement and the resistance to it. Their dichotomy is compulsory in the motivational structure of the victim’s personality. The model of communicative situation of temptation is shaped as the system of situational dominants: SUBJECTtempter ACTS HERE and NOW from the MOTIVE based on the need of achievement on OBJECT-the system of beliefs and values of the RECIPIENT-victim with INTENT to coax the latter into action beneficial for the tempter through the use of INSTRUMENT-attractor.

Absent an attractor, the victim, without being stimulated, would not meet the conditions, accepted when such a stimulating agent appears. This goes to prove that the attractor exposure affects the emotional sphere of victim’s conceptual system, enabling the tempter to manipulate and control the mind of the recipient. The pragmatic meaning of temptation is generated by various verbal and nonverbal means that do not have specific temptation marking. The intention of temptation is defined through reconstructing implicatures with due regard for contextual restriction in any given communicative episode.