Abstract:

Teaching Business English in modern extralinguistic environment is one of the most important aspects of professional higher education in Russia. Future specialists in different spheres must know how to use foreign languages to organize and optimize their own job-related activities, be it commercial, industrial, scientific, managerial or any other professional area which requires a certain amount of cross-cultural interpersonal communication. Competences, fostered at Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO University), require for students to be able to set definitive goals of verbal interaction, then combine various linguistic means and rhetorical devices, arrange them in a carefully thought-out sequence to make a necessary pragmatic impact on English-speaking interlocutors.

By pragmatic impact here we mean:
- changing the recipient’s attitude to a certain phenomenon or a fact,
- modification of his / her emotional state and intentions,
- transforming categorial structure of people’s individual consciousness and introducing new categories,
- activation of particular cognitive frames and scenarios that are useful for the speaker.

Today Business English is one of the most popular communication systems, its goal being to establish partnership among the participants of discourse. Trust and mutual respect are the cornerstones of any business relationships, which are based on the ability
- to properly implement the speech strategy,
- efficiently model utterances,
- use different rhetorical devices to influence interlocutors’ intentions and decision-making,
- change other people’s viewpoints on the problem under discussion,
- modify the communicative situation to the speaker’s advantage.

It isn’t always easy to do all the things mentioned above, because such functional peculiarities of English business discourse as conventional communicative norms, strict regulation of verbal interaction, obligatory adherence to rules and roles impose considerable limitations on the range of linguistic means available to the participants of discourse. Thus, it is necessary to research into effective ways of making a pragmatic impact on recipients and forming the required functional field, especially with the help of irony – a very specific rhetorical figure. This paper aims at revealing useful functional properties of irony in business communication through the methodology of functional-linguistic analysis and finding ways of integrating the results into the educational process.

Keywords:

Functional linguistics, teaching methodology, rhetoric, irony, Business English, discourse studies.