REALIZATION OF THE EVALUATING FUNCTION OF THE SCIENTIFIC PAPER AS A SPEECH GENRE

Abstract

The article presents the overview of different approaches to the notion of the speech genre: as a sequence of sentences; as a stylistic notion; as a discourse category; as a synonym of communicative situation, etc. The authors investigate the possibility to study any text of a scientific article under the frame of the modern tendencies in the linguistic sphere, where one of the most interesting is the communicative-pragmatic aspect. Taking into consideration the fact, that the notion of speech genre is one of the main notions of pragma-linguistics the authors, based on different approaches in understanding this phenomenon, suggest the following working definition of a scientific paper as a speech genre. It is defined as the unity of scientific statements that are combined under the communicative aim of the author to prove hypothesis, conception, or theory, thus providing the scientific activity. Considering a scientific article as a separate kind of informative evaluative speech genre presupposes the analysis of different approaches to the notion of the evaluation and the problem of the actualization of the evaluating function in a scientific article. Evaluation can be considered as a unique category that is explicitly and implicitly realized in different levels of language means. Evaluating function in the texts of scientific articles can be explicit with the help of different means of certain modality via the use of communicative strategy of hedging. Hedging in a modern scientific discourse presents a poly-functional communicative strategy that is verbalized by means of language signals (hedges). The authors consider the hedging function as the means of lowering straightforwardness in evaluating scientific facts and opinions, thus promoting more effective scientific communication. The authors suggest considering scientific texts production as a verbalization of an author’s communicative task with the help of a set of certain communicative strategies. According to the authors the perspectives of future studies can be focused on the analysis of evaluating function in the texts of technical and humanitarian scientific articles.