Lexical-semantic means of expressing the attitude of the subject of speech to objective reality in the literary-critical discourse

Abstract

The article touches upon means of expressing the objectivity and subjectivity of evaluation in literary-critical discourse. We establish those nominative and communicative language items ranging from word to text that perform the function of evaluation expression and forming complex structures serving to convey additional axiological nuances. In our article, we relied on the structural components of evaluation: the subject of evaluation, that is, the person (or socium); object of evaluation — a thing or phenomenon; estimated predicate; the nature of the assessment (or the scale of assessment); estimated stereotype and assessment of motivation. We found out that the main function of the semantic-stylistic category of evaluation is the expression of the attitude of the subject of speech to the objective reality during the communication. Studing the lexical-semantic expression system in the literary-critical discourse and analyzing axiologically-tagged lexemes, we found out that all lexemes can be divided into two groups: with general and partial value. After a comprehensive analysis, an attempt is made to differentiate between the means of expressing objectivity and subjectivity represented by the author’s assessment.