Socio-Communicative Register Switching as a Parameter of Linguistic Creativity: Cinematic Discourse vs Discourse of Children's Literature

Abstract

This study is devoted to the discourse specificity of socio-communicative register switching as a parameter of linguistic creativity. A contrastive analysis of cinematic discourse and discourse of children's literature helped to define the characteristics of register and the criteria of socio-communicative dissonance, which served to distinguish between creative and non-creative use of register switching. The study identifies three creative techniques of register switching, demonstrating socio-communicative dissonance (as intentional pragmatic distortion) in social roles, communicative situations and socio-communicative discourse format. The results indicate the parametric variance of activity in the discourse types under consideration, with higher values of both creative and non-creative techniques in the discourse of children's literature, and higher relative values of creative vs non-creative use of socio-communicative register switching in cinematic discourse. The results also demonstrate the efficiency of the parametric method in the study of linguistic creativity.