Гуманитарный вектор (Feb 2020)
On the Evolution and Transformation of Restaurant Criticism Discourse
Abstract
The article is devoted to such a variety of media discourse as restaurant criticism discourse. The problem of terminological discrepancy between the name of the restaurant criticism genre and its communicative intention, which arose as a result of the evolution and transformation of the studied discourse, was first identified. The transformation process is examined by the example of journalistic practices of the business press. The purpose of the article is to trace the evolution of genre signs of restaurant criticism, rhetorical techniques of a journalist’s linguistic personality. In the research process, the methodology of modern discourse analysis was used, linguistic methods of text analysis were used. The vectors of transformation of evaluative discourse into advertising discourse are revealed, the system of expressive means in authentic (journalistic) and transformed media text is studied. We conclude that in the context of restaurant criticism, discourse can be defined as speech activity based on the paradigm of speech genres, the subject area of which is the assessment of the cuisine, wine list, service and atmosphere of the restaurant. A feature of evaluative discourse is the dominance of the acting function, which emphasizes the emotional value of the media text. Based on the data obtained, it can be concluded that the prevalence of marketing information and the simplification of vocabulary, the absence of precedent phenomena, the poverty of stylistic devices, the uniformity of syntactic constructions (the most frequent syntactic stylistic device was the use of ordinary repetitions) in the research material indicate not only the genre transformation of restaurant criticism but also the transformation of evaluative discourse as a whole. Instead of restaurant criticism, the audience is offered an advertisement of a restaurant service with all the inherent signs of an advertising discourse: marketing information, a comprehensive impact on the senses of the addressee, a positive assessment, the absence of a critical look at deficiencies, orientation to a specific communicative goal – to form a positive attitude, interest in the object, arouse desire visit the restaurant. Thus, critical judgment is reduced to an informative statement, the almost neutral emotive tonality reflects the spectrum of the pragmatic tasks of the author.
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