Macro- and Microstructure of an Autobiographic Genre: Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of sports autobiography specifics as an institutional discourse genre. The relevance of the study is determined not only by the need for a systematic linguistic study of literary texts in new conditions dictated by the lingua-cognitive research paradigm, but also by the fact that in modern linguistic researches sports autobiography is not sufficiently represented as a discursive genre. The study purpose is to identify structural regularities of an autobiography used to create the image of the main character and to represent professionally and personally oriented relationships in sport. Achieving this goal involves solving the following tasks: 1) developing an algorithm for lingua-cognitive analysis of a sports autobiography text, 2) determining the macro- and microstructural units of the discursive genre under consideration. The research material is based on the autobiographies of boxer M. Tyson «Undisputed Truth» and chess player A. Karpov «Life and Chess. My autobiography». Due to objective and subjective factors, the autobiographies differ significantly in lexical, stylistic, and thematic aspects. However, both autobiographies have several common features and characteristics that have been established during the study. In particular, the use of content analysis contributed to the identification of six macrostructural components of sports autobiographies and the results of the directed associative experiment made it possible to identify frames that act as sports autobiography microstructural components. The results of the study develop and complement the theoretical principles of discourse science and expand the understanding of the modern professional linguistic personality of a sportsman.

Keywords

• sports autobiography genre
• subgenre of sportsman`s autobiography
• sports discourse
• microstructure
• macrostructure
• frame