LEXICAL AND SEMANTIC FEATURES OF A FILM REVIEW AS A GENRE

Abstract

The article describes distinctive features of a film review as a speech genre which is now one of the most popular genres of the mass media net discourse. The article proves its intertextual character and analyses its lexical and semantic features. Film reviews taken from the following sources: sites of cinema goers: www.imdb.com, www.empireonline.com, www.pluggedin.com ; official sites of film critics (e.g. R. Ebert) https://www.rogerebert.com; official sites of the newspapers: The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/reviews/movies, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/film+tone/reviews and other sites: https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=movie-review, https://www.pluggedin.com/movie-reviews/. The material for analysis comprises about 100 film reviews released in 2020. The reviews are in open access in the Internet. The volume of the analysed material is about 200 pages. The method used to achieve the main objective is interpretation analysis of film reviews. As a result of the theoretical material analysis main directions in the genre research were specified; key distinctive features of a film review were studied. The actuality of the research is determined by the rising interest to net mass media discourse genres. The main objective is to elicit and describe lexical and semantic features of film reviews as a speech genre. The conducted research made it possible to prove the interdiscoursive and poly-discoursive nature of the genre in question and to systematize its lexical and semantic features. The analysis disclosed that intertextuality of a film review is actualized in the interaction of three types of discourse: that of the critic, that of the film and that of other people. Poly-discoursive nature of a film review is expressed through the combination of publicistic, literary and scientific styles features. Another important characteristic is evaluativity represented in emotionally coloured vocabulary. Among other lexical and semantic features are the following: usage of non-specific terms, cliches, rhetorical questions with precedent names, intertextual inserting, various stylistic devices, among which epithets and metaphors are most often used. It’s been observed that a film review is filled with bookish vocabulary as well as stylistically low words and expressions.