Article

Name: “I, Maya Plisetskaya”: linguistic identity in the context of emotional and evaluative activity

Authors: Tatiana A. Tripolskaya, Huang Xiaoyu

Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

The author of the memoir text is investigated concerning her emotional and evaluative activity within linguistic personality theory based upon the integrity of scientific knowledge, dialogism, and comparativism.

Emotive and evaluative discourse integrated into the text “I, Maya Plisetskaya” allows us to reveal multifaceted description of a speaking individual forming her lexicon, world view, and communication techniques and strategies being influenced by axiological vocabulary of the epoch, area of her activity, her education, cultural level, character, and her language taste.

Research of emotive and evaluative discourse gives an opportunity to simulate an integral figure of a speaking individual and to analyze individual and group language variations.

The research allowed us to reveal the following characteristics of the linguistic individual: invariability of axiological world view and lexical ways of its representation throughout the whole life; intensity and all-or-nothing axiological semantics; black-and-white evaluative scale within the system of values which scarcely admits halftones.

Emotive and evaluative lexicon represents the main conceptual domains of the author’s world view: talent/creativity/theater and independence / rebelliousness / love of freedom of a person in the world which lacks freedom. The main author’s technique in forming her vocabulary is reinterpreting and redirecting negative evaluations of ‘enemies of the people’ commonly mentioned in newspapers towards the representatives of the totalitarian regime.

The memoir text portrays the author’s and the addressee’s images and searching of the author’s own word and her own way of getting an opportunity of being heard: the author chooses special strategies and tactics for presenting her axiological points (direct and indirect evaluative actions which are supposed to confirm, temper, and foreground certain emotive and evaluative content).

Keywords: anthropocentric branch of linguistics, linguistic identity, emotive and evaluative dis-course, axiological world view, communicative techniques and strategies of expressing evaluation and self-evaluation

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