Экспрессивность декларации ЮНЕСКО о выдающейся универсальной ценности объекта всемирного наследия

Abstract

The paper deals with expressiveness as a genre characteristic of Statements of Outstanding Universal Value (SOUV) of World Heritage Sites, which is one of the major documents accompanying the famous project of UNESCO. The stylistic analysis of the corpus of SOUVs, available at the UNESCO website, has revealed that expressiveness of the documents under consideration is determined by their communicative tasks, which consist in informing the international community about the existence of unique objects, in describing their properties and convincing the target group of their high universal value. The study has shown that the main expressive means in the documents are epithets, which have been classified depending on their contextual semantics into epithets that characterize the uniqueness, significance, and aesthetics of the sites. The dominant expressive means have been identified, including ‘outstanding’ and ‘unique’ in the first group, ‘universal’, ‘significant’, ‘important’ in the second one, ‘beauty’ and ‘beautiful’ in the third group. Their contextual synonyms have been identified along with the means that actualize the semantics of the core expressive lexicon in the documents. The main technique that accentuates the semantics of expressive lexical units is recurrency. It is used both within a single document and across the entire corpus of statements. The main functions of recurrency include informing and convincing the target group. Recurrency serves as a means of representing the universal outstanding value of World Heritage Sites. Moreover, this technique has been found to determine the process of standardizing the SOUVs’ expressiveness, creating a combination of expressiveness and standard characteristic of this documentation. In addition, the recurrency of expressive vocabulary contributes to the coherence of documents in the single corpus of SOUVs.