Discursive-cognitive paradigm of the category of politeness in scientific communication (on the material of German-language reviews)

Abstract

Problems of functioning of linguistic category of politeness in scientific discourse is relevant and not fully studied. The purpose of this article is a discourseoriented analysis of the implementation of that category. Within the framework of this study, textual typological, anthropocentric and intertextual features are taken into account. Secondary informativeness of the review is characterized by compression of the content space of the primary scientific text and by other features. The material of the study was reviews of articles and monographs in the field of German studies, sociolinguistics and methods of teaching German as a foreign language. The research methods are the contextual method, the method of linguistic interpretation of the text, the comparative method. Forms of politeness are the object of study from the point of view of various perspectives. As the analysis showed, the concept of conventional academic politeness reveals its polytextual nature, interacting with such categories as accentuation, evaluation, modality, intertextuality, dialogicity. Communication in the scientific-critical discourse has its own characteristics, which reveal themselves in the evaluativemodal markers of positive and negative politeness. Three microfields of negative assessment can be distinguished: reinforcing, neutral and mitigating. The last of the listed microfields can be considered as negative politeness. The modal and temporal markedness of the modes of reinforcing and mitigating a negative assessment is localized in the compositional and semantic structure of the review text. Positive and negative politeness accompanies the evaluative-argumentative segments of the communicative-pragmatic paradigm of scientific-critical intertext.