THE AGENCY THEORY AND THE PROSPECTS FOR ITS APPLICATION IN THE STUDIES OF RITUALIZED COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICES

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the agency concept in the modern social and linguistic sciences and to highlighting the core theoretical principles for this concept’s application in the study of ritualized forms of communication on the material of English-language linguistic culture. The article envisages the contemporary philosophical, sociological, anthropological, semiotic, linguistic, pragmatic and communicative approaches to the study of agency, its defi nition, the allocation of its components, types and expression levels. Comprehensive study of ritualized forms of communication requires the development of theoretical foundations for in-depth analysis of agency in the formation and expression of the socio-communicative status of participants in such a communicative interaction, the establishment of linguistic and pragmatic features that characterize the correlations between them as well as elaboration of semiotic characteristics of the types and forms of ritualized performance, both in behavioral and in linguistic aspects.. The specifi city of the ritualized forms of communication makes it particularly important to conduct a research of such aspects of agency in contemporary English-language communicative practices as correlations of intentionality / non-intentionality, animate / inanimate, agency levels, structural and semantic organization of the relationship between the agent / patient in communicative interaction as well as distribution and mediation properties.