Speech Strategy

a speech strategy is basically a complex of speech actions aimed at achieving communicative goals

From the functional perspective, all strategies are divided into basic and supplementary. Basic strategies are those considered most significant at a given stage of communicative interaction in terms of the hierarchy of motives and goals. Supplementary strategies, on the other hand, facilitate efficient organisation of dialogic interaction and help exert appropriate influence on the recipient.
According to Mannan (2013), a communicative strategy comprises the following structural components:
• choosing the general speech intention such as an intention to make a statement, ask a question, make a request, propose a suggestion, etc.;
• selecting semantic components of the utterance, as well as the extralinguistic setting, corresponding to the modifying communicative meanings;
• defining the scope of the information accounting for one theme (topic), one rheme, (explanatory/context information), etc.;
• correlating bits of information referring to the state of consciousness of communicating entities and the empathy factor;
• defining the sequence of communication components (for example, if the speaker is deeply impressed by what is happening, he or she might begin the sentence with the rheme, thus moving the theme to the end position);
• adjusting the communicative structure of the sentence thus setting a specific communicative mode (dialogue, narration, verbalisation of a written text), style (epic, colloquial) and genre.
Strategies deployed in the framework of business communication can be (a) discursive strategies outlining the structure and sequence of communicative interactions; (b) rhetoric strategies realised explicitly and implicitly in order to influence the recipient; or (c) compensatory strategies used to fix various possible linguistic errors and communicative failures (Guffey & Loewy, 2012)
Studies suggest that all types of strategies can be generally reduced to three universal and most exhaustive classes, which are presentations, manipulation, and conventions (Tomalin, 2012).