International Journal of Philology

The article focuses on the initial stage of the communicative contact. The paper examines functional and semantic properties of metacommunicative contact-establishing topicalizing questions as organizational means of dialogic discourse. The spectrum of metacommunicative contact-establishing themes realized by topicalizing questions in modern English dialogic discourse is suggested. Metacommunicative contact-establishing topicalizing questions regulate the flow of interaction, contribute to the realization of communicative feedback

metacommunicative contact-establishing topicalizing question; dialogic discourse; interaction; communicative contact; phatic communion