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LinguistsВ’ reviews in terms of subjective modality

S. Polkovnikova, I. Teilane, S. Liepa

Abstract

In the last decade, the research of a scientific text from the perspective of communicative function has become a focal point of linguistics. Great attention is paid both to the analysis of the text formation mechanism and to the principles and legitimacy of the creation of specific scientific text genres. Unfortunately, there are still few studies in Latvia dedicated to the structural and semantic analysis of various scientific texts. Therefore, the current study focuses on linguists' reviews of doctoral theses and looks at them from a linguistic and pragmatic perspective. The question of how author's individuality can be expressed in a scientific text is still. On the one hand, the stereotyping and stenciling of the main feature of a scientific text supports its impersonality and leveling of individual features. On the other hand, any text created by a person will always be an expression of subjectivity. Author's individuality is expressed in the verbal embodiment of thought and is realized in the use of evaluative, emotionally marked and expressive means of language, which in general form a special tonality of the text. The emotionality of a scientific text can be viewed from two perspectives. Firstly, as author's emotional attitude in the course of a scientific text creation; secondly, as features of a scientific text, the task of which is to realize various communicative pragmatic functions and achieve a certain communicative goal. With regard to text creation, a review is a type of secondary text with a relatively flexible structure and laconic presentation of the content. From a communicatively pragmatic perspective, a review is a text that fulfills a dual function – informative and evaluative. The review must be both intellectually and emotionally impressive, as one of its stylistic dominants is the evaluation. The study examines in more detail what lexical means reviewers use in their texts to achieve the impression of a positive evaluation. The analysis carried out allows to conclude that in linguists' reviews of doctoral theses, the positive evaluation is often actualized by the adjectives successful and wide or the adverbs derived from these adjectives, i.e., successfully and widely. To illustrate, the following examples can be provided: the author's choice has been quite successful; the principles of analysis developed by the author are successful; the author has accurately and successfully formulated his position; the conclusions are successfully substantiated; the author has compiled a wide range of language material; the author has identified a sufficiently wide set of theoretical sources; the author has skillfully analyzed a relatively wide range of theoretical literature, etc. In the text, these lexical means allow to actualize various pragmatic functions and to achieve the impression of rational and subjective evaluation.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sws.iscah.f2020.7.2/s10.17

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