The variety of evaluation in communicative practices of academic discourse

Abstract

The article represents a discourse-analytical and corpus study of the evaluation of language as a pragmatic tool in the structure of the professional scientific activity of German linguists. The aim of the work consists in outlining the functional-communicative variety of the evaluation language, depending on the principal task of scientific research, scientific expert and scientific-educational communication practices. The scholarly relevance of the research rests on its incorporation into modern interdisciplinary studies of language resources from the aspect of linguistic pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics and discourse linguistics, which are directed, on the whole, towards the study of the language and interpretation of the meaning of language signs within the framework of real social contexts while also taking into account a wide range of extralinguistic factors. The novelty of the research is evident in the following results: for the first time, the linguistic variety of evaluations dependent on the general aim of communication practice, which determines the axiological perspective, is considered; a disciplinary correlated classification of evaluation with the allocation of epistemic cognitive, expert and persuasive evaluation is proposed; the essential differences between the selected types of evaluation in the pragmatic categories of author-centricity, normo-centricity and addresseecentricity are substantiated; the text- and discourse-forming part played by language markers of the evaluation category of importance/relevance in profiling and promoting established knowledge in the process of teaching the fundamental theoretical disciplines is revealed. The research material was the German-language corpus of journal articles, scientific reviews and university textbooks on linguistics.