Gender Specifiers of Intimizing Social Work Borderline Communication

https://doi.org/10.26907/2658-3321.2024.7.1.50-59

Abstract

This item focuses on identifying and analyzing the functional pragmatics of the most common gender specifiers of feminine-feminine social work borderline communication with the population. As the material of the study, the scripts were used obtained at the reception desk in the office of Committee of Labor and Social Welfare, the scripts finally entering the researcher’s personal file. Hermeneutic & semantic, contextual and discourse analysis was employed to identify the mechanisms behind the convergence of personal (emotional and gender-marked) components bearing elements of institutionalization (explication of the status role). The parallel use of gender specifiers and status-role markers offers the greatest perlocative effect. Syntone-appeals, hesitators with explanatory components and expressive syntactic constructions are viewed as the most pragmatically charged intimization methods typical of feminine-feminine communication. Based on the variable components of metaconcepts, which are also distributed and introduced into the clients’ concept-valor system, partially overlapping areas of the initial goal-setting space is created for all participants involved in the communicative action – agents, clients and tertiariis agens. Leveling the institutional components in the overtones of “involvement”, “disposition” and “experiencing” allows predicting the vectors for the discourse progress, whereas a shift towards personally-oriented communication eliminates the need for employing direct argumentum ad baculinum, which gives way to argumentum ad misericordiam and argumentum ad verecundiam. All of the features above can be definitely attributed to the feminine gender display, which is represented in the borderline social work discourse, i.e., the focus of the study.