PRAGMATIC FILTERS SHAPING A COGNITIVE EVALUATIVE JUDGMENT INTO AN EVALUATIVE UTTERANCE (ON THE SAMPLES FROM ENGLISH LITERARY DISCOURSE)

Abstract

The article focuses on the pragmatic peculiarities of the formation of an evaluative cognitive judgment and its transformation into an evaluative communicative utterance. The material under analysis is represented by speech episodes taken from English literary discourse in which the characters express positive evaluation of certain objects. Literary discourse as a product of the author's cognitive and speech-productive activity necessarily implies the author's attitude: modality and evaluation. Both are manifested in all discourse segments, including reproduced dialogue. The dialogic speech of the fiction is seen as an imitation of oral conversation and is largely regulated by its formation and functional principles. Speech authenticity in fiction is achieved by imitating the main characteristics of oral speech: emotionality, spontaneity, its situational and contact-oriented character, etc. Evaluation expressed by literary discourse characters is always connected with peculiar connotations allowing the author to express his attitude to a certain object, and evaluation manifestation in a word is accompanied by an extension and deepening of a semantic meaning. A speaker’s evaluative utterance does not necessarily equal his or her evaluative judgment as to its intensity and the plus-minus character. The article offers a number of variants of the correlation between an evaluative judgment and an evaluative utterance. Being shaped into an utterance, a mental judgment goes through pragmatic filters. The pragmatic filters that determine the transformation of an evaluative judgment into an evaluative utterance have been identified as the following: sticking to the speech etiquette and rituals, following “face-saving” tactics, mitigating refusal of criticism, manipulating the addressee. It has been found out that communicants tend to use evaluative utterances as a means of certain communicative tactics, such as “face-saving” tactics used to skirt a topic, as well as mitigation tactics, used to mitigate refusal or criticism. Thus, instead of expressing some negative evaluation, a communicant may opt to keep silent, or soften a negative evaluative statement, or even express an opposite positive evaluative statement. Genuine evaluative judgments become explicit to the reader of a literary discourse from the author's description of the characters' non-verbal behaviour and their thoughts.