NEGATIVE MARKEDNESS AS SPANISH ANALYTIC ARTICLE AUTHOR STRATEGY (based on authors’ columns of J. Marías and J. Cercas)

Abstract

This article deals with the Spanish analytic columns written by prominent modern writers J. Marías y J. Cercas for the Sunday supplement of Spanish national quality paper «El País» and one of its main strategies which can be defined as negative focus or a negative frame for presenting their articles. The aim of our investigation was to confirm our hypothesis by analyzing a significant corpus of publications (since 2010 till now) that the negative markedness turns to be a distinctive sigh of this type of analytical writings mostly due to relevant position of its authors in the Spanish literature world and its huge experience as journalists. Being determined by the actual social totally extralinguistic conditions, the preliminary negative evaluation influences on the author election of all language levels means such as lexical, syntactical, first of all, and by combining them in order to increase the pragmatic value of the publication. The author´s idea is expressed by integrating all possible means to transmit the main strategy which intention is to attract the readers´ attention to that particular part of the Spanish reality, to make him/her get interested and involved in the information and, if possible, to influence on his/her attitude to it by the unique interpretation methods used by Marías y Cercas. The negative evaluativity of author column detected even at first glance on semantic level is able to transform into powerful pragmatic tool. The examined material has widely proved that negative evaluative perspective of columns reveals the author´s intention to touch the reader and reach the efficiency by appealing to his emotions and evaluating criteria.