Online movie review as a person-oriented type of discourse

Abstract

The article examines the features of the presence of a person-oriented type of discourse in the online movie review written in English. Personal discourse in itself covers almost all text types generated by the Internet due to the presence of various verbal and non-verbal means of converging the addressee of the communicative message. The variety of linguistic characteristics of disclosing the inner world of a person, verbal means of expressing interpersonal relations, lexical means of explicating the category of a person and other way of linguistic representation of the author's self determine the consideration of online movie reviews as a person-oriented type of discourse. The aim of this article is to analyze the linguistic means of manifestation the personal discourse in the English-language amateur movie review. The empirical material collected for description, classification and analysis in this paper is based upon a corpus of movie reviews taken from the American review-aggregation website for film and television Rotten Tomatoes. The person-oriented type of discourse is intrinsically inherent in the online movie review due to its fundamentally dialogic nature and the low level of formalization of the communicative message. The analysis of the online movie reviews has revealed that the attributive feature of the deployment of personal discourse in the online movie review is a statement that carries subjective modality. Personal and demonstrative pronouns in conjunction with modal words, verbs and particles are those lexical means which express a subjective attitude towards the film. The explicators of the modal-evaluative meanings in the online movie review are parenthesis and inversion. In addition to emotional and expressive vocabulary, the personal discourse of online movie reviews manifests itself in the widespread use of colloquial vocabulary.