Comic techniques as the means of transmitting negative evaluation in the English-language online movie reviews

Abstract

The article discusses the linguistic means of implementing comic in order to convey negative evaluativeness in the English-language online movie reviews. The various comic techniques are a rich linguistic arsenal for showing authors criticism. The pragmatic motivation of satirical and ironic texts is the introduction of new, different from the existing information on the object of humor. By incorporating humorous elements into the online movie reviews, the author creates a communicative situation characterized by a semi-serious tone. The purpose of this article is to consider in the film review linguistic means of transmitting the comic, bearing a negative modal-evaluative value. The empirical material for the description, classification and analysis in this study was the corpus of 45 film reviews of 20202022, taken from the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. The humorization of online movie reviews occurs due to a wide range of traditional comic techniques, the main ones of which include comic extended metaphor, irony, sarcasm, hyperbolization, oxymoron, pun. Among the situational stylistic techniques of comic, allusion, comparison, antithesis, colloquialisms, slang should be distinguished. The cases of internal deformation of phraseological units are noticeable, the transformation of the structure occurs due to the implementation of a lexico-semantic unit associated with the conceptual field cinema, which leads to a comic rethinking of a fixed expression.

Keywords

• online movie review
• evaluativeness
• negative evaluativeness
• humor
• comic techniques
• subjective modality
• perlocative effect
• english