Hypergenre of Coaching Conversation: Study of Intentional and Structural Hybridity

This paper presents the results of a study on the hypergenre of the coaching conversation, which the authors classify as part of institutional business discourse. This genre, originally borrowed by Russian-language linguaculture, is gradually acquiring ethnospecific characteristics in contemporary Russia. The genre "passport" of the hypergenre of the coaching conversation was developed considering the genrogenic situation framework (Dementyev V.V.), which emerged for this genre in early 21st-century Russia. Coach-client communication is characterized as polyaddress, discrete, emotiogenic, and indirect, employing provocative speech genres to facilitate positive cognitive changes in the client. The study reveals that the coaching conversation hypergenre is a complex speech genre with a multifaceted intentional structure, formalizing a polyphasic communicative situation involving both coach and client. The building blocks of the HGC CB include subgenres that correspond to distinct phases of coach-client interaction, bi-genres (positional dyadic speech-genre combinations), and elementary subgenres present in the speech of both participants. In analyzing the "speech-genre flow" within the hypergenre of the coaching conversation, the discreteness of communication becomes prominent: thoughts and speech genres are combined within the utterances of coach and client, undergoing cognitive and genre convergence. Within this polyaddress communication, the subjective "I" acquires new dimensions. Firstly, the "exterior I" functions as an additional addressee—beyond the immediate interlocutor—to construct the client’s "desired future." Secondly, speakers may address themselves, rendering their genre statements self-referential (e.g., through notation or reproach), and the interaction exhibits features of autocommunication alongside dialogue.