Expressing the Author's Position in the English-Language Network Film Review

Abstract

Introduction. The article presents the results of the analysis of the author’s position verbalization methods in the English online professional film review addressed to the mainstream audience. The authors proceed from the position that the methods of subject verbalization are determined by functional characteristics of discourse. The relevance of the study is due to the interest of modern linguistics in the study of the subject factor in “personal” types of discourse. The paper considers the factor of the subject in the discourse, defines the concepts of authorization and its nomination, analyzes the role of identifying categories of subjective modality and describing prevalent evaluation types in the study of the author's position in evaluative genres.Methodology and sources. Research methodology is based on the approaches to classification of modus and evaluation types developed by N.D. Arutyunova. The methodology of describing the author's position in evaluative genres is proposed, which boils down to the following steps: identifying the leading linguistic means of self-nomination; displaying main genre-typical patterns of subject modality (modus types); describing evaluation semantics specificity and linguistic means of dominant evaluative meanings verbalization. The study was conducted on the material of the corpus of texts selected on the English-language portal metacritic.com which includes 50 professional film reviews addressed to a wide audience (39,765 words in length).Results and discussion. Based on the methods of quantitative and contextual analysis the distribution of modus types verbalized by “subject-predicate” models with personal subject-representing pronouns was carried out; the distribution of personal and possessive pronouns as the main method of self-nomination in the discourse of the network English-language professional film review was revealed; on the basis of the analysis of the semantics of evaluative adjectives of the corpus, the types of evaluative meanings in the genre under study were identified. The leading methods of discourse subject nomination were shown to involve the 1-st person pl. inclusive pronoun, which indicates the author’s intention to establish a connection with the reader and to increase the manipulative potential of the text. The main types of evaluative meanings verbalized by the corpora adjectives were identified, which are emotional, intellectual, aesthetic and regulatory types.Conclusion. The conducted research allowed us to conclude that the specificity of the expression of the author's position in professional network film review is reduced to the following characteristics: the dominant nature of the perceptual mode and the mental mode of knowledge in the field of subjective modality of texts; the predominance of first-person plural pronouns in an inclusive meaning as a means of self-nomination of the subject discourse and the dominance of partial-evaluative meanings over general-evaluative ones. The predominance of emotional-psychological and intellectual-psychological types of evaluation indicates the author's intention to express an individualized subjective-emotional opinion about the evaluated object.