The principle of priority in actualizing the hidden meanings of a metaphorical provocative statement

this article examines the process of foregrounding situationally relevant meanings in a metaphorical provocative utterance, and identifies tactics for obscuring hidden meanings that, in the view of the sender of the text, should occupy a peripheral position "here and now." In this process of semantic modeling, the pragmatic principle of priority plays a key role, representing the mechanism of conscious (in vocabulary) or unconscious (in grammar) selection of relevant units in speech production. The author analyzes provocative small syntactic groups (MSGs) built on metaphor to determine the degree of their influence on the formation of the meaning of the entire utterance, realized in a psychotherapeutic session. The study concludes that the principle of priority actualizes hidden meanings (concepts) not randomly, but in accordance with the speaker's intentional attitudes, pursuing the provocative goal of extracting an effective component from an information segment, using it to transform the client's destructive ideological attitudes and motivate them to perform a specific verbal act. The relevance of this study is explained by the interest of both specialists in pragmalinguistics and the general public – people wishing to understand the process of speech creation, which can reproject the thinking and/or behavior of an individual in need of psychological help. The author studied these issues from the perspective of hidden pragmalinguistics, drawing on medical discourse in the psychotherapeutic genre. Therefore, alternative terms were given for the speaker and listener: the speaker is the sender of the text, or psychotherapist; the listener is the recipient of the text, or client. The study's results may be useful both to pragmalinguists interested in the perlocutionary effect in structuring meaning and to practicing psychotherapists when choosing speech tactics for psychotherapy.

provocativeness, provocative psychotherapy, indirect speech act, metaphor, hidden meaning, influence