SPEECH STRATEGY OF SELF-PRESENTATION IN ENGLISH DOCUMENTS WHEN SEARCHING FOR WORK

Abstract

Statement of the problem. The article discusses linguistic means of self-presentation strategy in the English-language documents pertaining to the job-hunting discourse. Definitions of the speech strategy of various scientists are given. The aim of the study is to identify and to describe the language means of self-presentation in the English-language documents in the job hunting discourse. The material of the study is resumes and CV written in English. The material was obtained on job-hunting websites, such as Balance, Career Addict, Career Blog, Indeed, Resume.io, Stand Out CV, Zety. Results. In the course of the study, it was revealed that the usage of certain tactics in a resume helps the speaker to convey the information, and contributes to achieving the ultimate goal of acquiring a position within a company. Among those tactics are: self-nomination, self-description, presentation of one’s professional achievements and description of one’s professional responsibilities. The tactics of self-nomination is one of the important tactics in the framework of the self-presentation strategy. Conclusion. The strategy used by the speaker in resumes includes self-nomination and self-description, which is expressed through structural, semantic and grammatical characteristics of language means. In business discourse, which is a type of institutional discourse, the strategy of self-presentation and its tactics (self-nomination, self-description, presentation of one’s professional achievements and description of one’s professional responsibilities) are used in the process of communication. When preparing a resume or CV, searching for work and putting the documents on the Internet, the speaker uses self-presentation as the central speech strategy. Language means of self-presentation include the names of professions and posts to which the applicant belongs, as well as nouns professional and specialist; fragments of the text with self-description, elliptical syntactic constructions. The frequency of self-nomination tactics in the genre of resume is slightly more than 4% of the total number of linguistic means of self-presentation. Despite the low quantitative representation of this tactics, self-nomination is an important component of the aforementioned speech strategy. Self-nomination is often combined with other tactics, mostly with self-description and description of the speaker’s professional achievements.