Stylistics of American film reviews

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze the evaluative lexical and stylistic means of the English language used by reviewers to represent evaluation in American film reviews, and determines their role in text directive implementation. Evaluations are the result of understanding the film from the perspective of its compliance with the reviewer's own scale of values, and the reviewer decides what methods of expressing evaluativeness to use. During the analysis of linguistic means it was revealed that popular means of stylistic marking, through which evaluations are actualized, are epithets, metaphors, comparisons, allusions and irony. Most of the evaluative means are epithets. General evaluations qualify the film by the totality of its properties and, as a rule, are derived from private evaluations. The latter are focused on the most significant aspects of the film, which in this study we call objects of evaluation, namely, film characteristics, acting, characters, director’s work, screenwriter’s work. The corpus of examples shows that epithets are mainly used to express a positive evaluation in relation to all objects of evaluation stated in the study. Metaphors are in second place, then comparisons and allusions. Such techniques as irony and, in some cases, comparisons served as methods of expressing a negative evaluation. It is shown that in the considered discursive conditions, lexical and stylistic means not only express the reviewer's own attitude to a particular work, but also contribute to the formation of such in a potential viewer and reader. The conclusions note the prospects of studying the language means of updating the author's position in the genre of film review at the lexical and syntactic levels, using the classification by the type of evaluation object.