Evaluative (de)intensifiers in the service of polite academic expert communication: linguistic and cultural specifics

Abstract

The article actualises the connection between the category of politeness and the category of expert evaluation seen as a special discursive evaluation variety in the scientific and expert socio-communicative practice. (De)intensifiers of evaluation — lexical and grammatical means used for strengthening or softening of categorical character of evaluative statements in the academic reviews — are considered as elements of politeness strategies, aimed at maintaining of the reviewer’s and author’s image. The necessity of polite scientific expert communication is explained by the parameters of socio-communicative situation, in which academic journal reviews are embedded, first of all, by the fact that the new scientific knowledge presented in reviews has not yet been verified and is therefore particularly vulnerable to criticism. Due to image risks, reviewers are expected to perform cooperative communicative behavior in order to mitigate the effects of criticism. The study of evaluation (de)intensifiers as politeness markers is embedded in the modern discourse-linguistic and socio-communicative research paradigm. The research relevance is also explained by the insufficient comparative study of (de)intensification in the evaluative language. The qualitative-quantitative content analysis of 50 German- and Russian-language academic reviews in linguistics allows to highlight the means of (de)intensification of expert evaluation and to present them as center-periphery models (depending on the frequency of lexical and grammatical units in the data). In addition, the inclusion of these means into certain strategies of positive and negative politeness is considered. The hypothesis of linguistic and cultural specificity in the use of contextual (de)intensifiers of evaluation is confirmed.