“Gone to Eternity”: Speech Representation of Creative Personality in the Obituary

Abstract

The article discusses the speech representation of creative personality in the obituary. It is noted that journalists actively exploited the image of outstanding contemporary in order to establish a high social value of human-creator as a patriot and the creator of a great national culture. To identify the compositional types of the text is introduced the concept of communicative scenario as a combination of communicative actions, ordered in accordance with the algorithm of speech behavior. Based on the analysis of journalistic texts we highlight several communicative scenarios for assessing the person — commemorative dedication, obituary and dedication “to the hero of event”. Intentionality of each type of texts includes information about biography, portrait description, explanation of aesthetic evaluation of creative way, social assessment of the person. Details are considered to stylistic and speech features of presentation the individual in the texts of “obituary” scenario. The study shows that obituary distinguishes by the tone of sorrow and regret. The organizing principle of the text is the bitterness of the loss of man — the carrier of national culture, a leitmotif through all the narrative passes the inability and unwillingness to believe in the reality of what has happened. The article detailed investigation exposed speech mechanisms of transition from the tone of sorrow and regret to the assertion of eternal life: a great man does not die, he continues to live in his works, in the memoirs of contemporaries, “eternity”. It notes the particular importance of verb forms: predominant verbs in past perfect tense marking the irreversible loss and change of forms of the present and future tenses throughout the text is determined by the deployment of the keynote of eternal life. Refs 27.