Nonverbal components of communication in dialogues as a marker of character relationships in the work by A. P. Chekhov "Three Years"

Communication, which plays an integral role in human life, is reflected in a work of art mainly in the form of dialogue. With the help of dialogue, the author develops events, forms images of characters, and conveys the idea of the work. The subject of this study is the non-verbal components of communication included in the remarks to the replicas of Alexei Laptev, a character in the story by A.P. Chekhov's "Three Years". The purpose of the work is to determine ways of introducing non-verbal components of communication into the author’s comments accompanying Laptev’s speech when communicating with Belavina, to describe the remarks from the point of view of structure and semantics and to trace how nonverbal components reflect changes in the characters’ relationships. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that there are not many works on the study of the content and structure of remarks to Alexei Laptev’s replicas and the semantic analysis of the linguistic units included in the remarks, representing non-verbal components. The following results were obtained: 1) the methods of introducing non-verbal components of communication and the means of their expression were analyzed, 2) a constant non-linguistic characteristic of Laptev’s communicative behavior was determined – a change in voice volume and clarity of pronunciation, 3) the position of remarks in relation to the character’s replicas was identified – the author’s comments are prepositive and interpositive, 4) a number of verbs are proposed that capture changes in Laptev’s inner world and, as a consequence, the transformation of his attitude towards his wife. In the process of conducting the study we used the method of contextual analysis of a text fragment, semantic and structural analysis of language units.

remark, replica, nonverbal component, author's comment, dialogue, voice, communication, speech behavior, Alexey Laptev, Yulia Belavina