Typographical markers of emotionality used in expression of expert evaluation in German and Russian reviews in Linguistics

Abstract

This article explores the involvement of typographical means in the construction of evaluative meanings in expert scientific discourses. A qualitative context-semantic, axiological, and grapholinguistic analysis was carried out on the basis of 50 German and 50 Russian reviews in linguistics published in the period from 2016 to 2020 in high-ranking academic journals: Zeitschrift für Angewandte Linguistik, Zeitschrift für Rezensionen, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, Problems of Onomastics, Russian Journal of Linguistics, and Topics in the study of language. During the course of the study, typographical emotionality markers used by the authors of linguistic reviews were identified and classified. Conclusions are drawn regarding the involvement of the selected units in the typical evaluation strategies in linguistic reviews. Particular attention is paid to cases of communicative-functional transposition of visual-graphic emotionality markers. The prospects for future research include an investigation of a wider number of reviews chosen for the corpus in order to collect statistical data for a quantitative comparative analysis of typographically marked expert-evaluative statements. The novelty of the study is in the discussion of typographical means relevant for the texts that ensure effective professional communication in academia. The means of this nature are still insufficiently covered in the publications of Russian researchers. The results presented in this paper can contribute to the further study of the text types of scientific discourse in an interlingual and intercultural perspective and particularly to the study of the interaction of linguistic and typographical features used to construct an author’s identity in context.