Destructive Communicative Personalities: A Classification Attempt

Abstract

Destructiveness is viewed as a fundamental communicative category that determines the strategies and tactics of discourse interaction. Accordingly, destructive communication is understood as a type of communication aimed at deliberately and intentionally causing moral and physical harm to the interlocutor and accompanied with a feeling of satisfaction with the victim's sufferings. The material of the study included 1120 contexts of reflection, selected from Russian literary texts, the National Corpus of the Russian Language, Internet sources and journalistic texts, as well as data from a survey of Russian-speaking respondents. As a result, a classification of destructive communicative personality types is proposed based on the communicative tactics prevailing in their behavior. The authors distinguish three types of destructive communicative personalities: destructive communicative personalities practicing predominantly invective tactics of destructive communication, for example, ham (the boor); destructive communicative personalities practicing predominantly manipulative tactics – shantazhist (the blackmailer); destructive communicative personalities practicing combined invective-and-manipulative tactics – revnivets (the jealous type). These tactics can be implemented in a direct or indirect form. In the analyzed material, there is a prevalence of the communicative personality type who practices predominantly invective tactics of destructive communication. It is also possible to distinguish a potentially destructive personality type whose initial intention is not destructive, but whose communicative behavior can be eventually qualified as destructive from the perspective of the addresser and/or an observer.