Verbal means of implementing the strategy of persuasion in the texts of popular scientific internet resources on psychology

The article presents the results of a pragmalinguistic analysis of spoken and written texts on psychology posted on educational online resources. The research material is publications in German from the psychology website “HelloBetter” and videos in English from the YouTube channel “Psych2Go”. The aim of the study is to describe the system of communication tactics used for the successful implementation of the persuasion strategy within the framework of psychological discourse. Based on articles and videos posted on the Internet resources on psychology, the characteristic features of the authors’ speech behavior are identified, their communicative attitudes are analyzed, strategies and tactics of speech influence characteristic of the participants in psychological discourse are determined, as well as the most frequent ways of their implementation in written and oral speech. As a result, a system of tactics is designed that is used to implement the leading communicative strategy of persuasion: tactics of information, tactics of identification of the author with the recipient, tactics of emotional impact, tactics of understanding and sympathy, tactics of imitation of polemics, tactics of friendly advice. Specific techniques and means for a given communication situation, relating to different language levels and serving as markers of the communicative behavior of the authors of the considered resources have been established: the use of metaphorical words and expressions, syntactic-stilistic means, different types of sentences, imperative and subjunctive moods, modal words, emotionally charged words etc.. The contribution of the identified means to the implementation of the above-named tactics is considered. In the course of the undertaken pragmalinguistic analysis of psychological sites, universal linguistic, pragmastylistic and functional features typical of educational texts on psychology in English and German are identified.