Multifaceted Linguistic Pragmatics of Justification (Ukrainian Speech-Based Study)

Abstract

This paper investigates the communicative act of justification as a multi-faceted pragmatic and structural phenomenon. We argue that the properties of justification rely on the amount of face threat to be compensated by such an act, on the number of face-threatened communicators and the function of justification as a face threat-preventive or face threat-restoring device. Based on such criteria, the article identifies: 1) justification-prevention of the other’s face-threatening act and 2) justification-explanation/repair of the own face- threatening act. Such acts have the same illocutionary point but differ in degree of their strength, determining their different structural and pragmatic features. Justification-repair iconically reproduces the awkwardness of the denoted situations and correlates with the conversational-analytical notion of dispreference. It involves complication in verbal arrangement and interplay of multifacet pragmatics: indirect speech acts, which affect a refusal strategy of justification, correlate with the strategies of negative politeness and their corresponding maxims, which, in their turn, involve the cooperative maxims’ violation triggering the conversational implicature to communicate face-threats in an implicit way. Justification-prevention is subdivided into prepositional and postpositional types in regards to their auxiliary position in complex speech acts. They differ structurally and pragmatically, depending on the number of face-threatened participants. Prepositional justification is intended to compensate face-threats both to the interlocutor who may be imposed by the speaker’s act and to the speaker, who takes risk to be faced with refusal or rejection. It is less distinct and more structurally and pragmatically complex as compared to the postpositional justification that prevents the damage only to the speaker’s face.