Representation of the comforting strategy in modern German and English fiction discourse

The article discusses comforting strategy and the tactics of its implementation as they are represented in modern English and German fiction discourse. The communicative goal of comforting is to alleviate the distress of the interlocutor caused by some traumatic circumstances. It is considered to be an empathic act and an important component of supportive communication. Comforting has been studied in such disciplines as psychology, medicine, and pragmalinguistics. The relevance of the present research is due to the priority of the strategic approach to the study of communication, the universality of the phenomenon of comforting, its significance in the process of human interaction, and also the need for a taxonomy of tactics implementing this strategy to be developed. The aim of the work is to identify tactics that implement comforting strategy and the corresponding language means in German and English. The material for this study was German- and English-language works of fiction of the 21st century related to the genres of everyday prose and romance novel. The paper uses methods of linguistic observation and description, analysis of dictionary definitions, seme, contextual and pragmalinguistic analysis. Four groups of tactics implementing the comforting strategy are described. Object-oriented tactics are aimed directly at the emotions and volitional sphere of the object of comforting and include tactics of soothing, guilt relief, advice, mobilization. Subject- oriented tactics focus on the comforting subject, they are tactics of support and reference to personal experience. Situationally-oriented tactics refer to third parties and various circumstances related to the traumatic situation and include tactics of the opponent’s discreditation, optimism, reference to the past, generalization. Combined tactics do not fall strictly into any of the three beforementioned groups and include tactics of empathy, fatalism, and perspective change.