DIALOGUE MOVE ANALYSIS IN THE ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN THERAPEUTIC DISCOURSES

Abstract. The paper deals with discourse analysis of dialogues in the therapeutic discourses. The research objective is to find the universal and distinct features of the English and Russian discourses in terms of the manifestation of communicative move types. The research layout comprises the stages of collecting corpora, decomposing the clauses into communicative moves, dialogue move annotation, processing statistical data on move type distribution and drawing the conclusions based on the comparison of the English and Russian discourses. The annotation scheme includes labelling both the form (sentence types) and the intent of the move. The corpus-based data analysis demonstrates that the most frequent pairs of form/intent classes of the communicative moves and, vice versa, never or almost never used combinations of form/intent classes, are alike in both languages. However, the quantitative distribution of the classes among the speech acts produced by therapists and clients, specific formal ways to express various intents differ in the analyzed discourses. In addition, the discourses differ in the function that exclamatory and interrogative sentences perform. Corpus data also show that Russian therapists are more prone to explication of the client’s state, while English-speaking physicians tend to make use of the strategy of active listening rather than that of edification. The research results may be of use for psycholinguistic analysis of approaches to therapy within the framework of English- and Russian-speaking discourses; they may be handful for constructing knowledge bases for text mining as well.

Keywords: dialogue, communicative move, intent, conversation analysis, therapeutic discourse