Reviews of Russian periodicals in “The Journal of the Ministry of National Education”: Evaluative adjectives in an official government publication

Abstract

By the 1830s, the role of literature and journalism in shaping public opinion and promoting state ideology was growing in Russia. One of the first attempts of the government to take control of this process was the decision to publish The Journal of the Ministry of Education, with a mandatory review of domestic periodicals. The most important communicative purpose of the review of texts was to familiarize readers with the most important and well-meaning publications of Russian-language periodicals from the point of view of editorial reviewers. The inherent evaluative component of these texts is obvious, for the purpose of which all possible linguistic means allowed within the official publication were used, a significant role among which was assigned to evaluative adjectives and attributive collocations as the most capacious and concise characteristics of the described object. The objects of macro-evaluation through adjectives were peer-reviewed articles, their authors and periodicals on the whole; relevance, quality, educational value, accuracy and usefulness of the publications, their compliance with the official views, the author’s style, some individual facts of their content, etc. were subject to adjectival micro-evaluation. In the journal’s reviews of Russian periodicals, there are approximately 100 different-typed evaluative adjectives, including both adjectives of general evaluation (otlichnyi, otmennyi, prevoskhodnyi, khoroshii, etc.) and of a partial one. The most commonly used of all evaluative adjectives throughout the existence of reviews were the adjectives liubopytnyi ‘having cognitive value’ and zamechatel’nyi ‘worthy of attention’, which cover almost all sections in the reviews. By the 1860s, the style of writing media-reviews in the journal became well established. During this time, individual author’s words and attributive collocations almost go out of use and rows of homogeneous attributes become rare. Additionally, the range of evaluative adjectives involved is narrowed and impoverished, and they themselves get an exclusively neutral stylistic colour, which is specific to the official publication.