Means of evaluating the author and character’s speech (case study of the literary biography by W. Isaacson “Steve Jobs: Biography”)

Abstract

In the paper, attention is focused on the means of expressing linguistic evaluation of the author and character’s speech. The critical and analytical review of scientific literature proves that one of the peculiarities of biographical texts is the profound concentration on the figure’s inner world. It has been established that the axiological activity of the author of the text is carried out with the help of two types of evaluation – logical (rational) and emotional (irrational). It has been proved and illustrated that the evaluation of knowledge about a phenomenon, a subject or a person can be positive and negative. Among the ways of expressing the evaluated subject, the author of the paper singles out the individual subject of evaluation, when the latter is provided by a certain person. The case study is the literary biography of W. Isaacson “Steve Jobs: Biography”. It has been found out that in this literary biography both the narrator of the text and the protagonist, Steve Jobs, act as individual subjects of evaluation as we observe both his own evaluation and the one given by the author. The position of the latter is realized in the text in the following ways: by direct reference to the people who surrounded Steve and influenced his development; through personal pronouns and word combinations with them; usage of parenthesis and parenthetical phrases. The individual subject of the evaluation of the protagonist is reflected in the literary autobiography with the help of personal pronouns, words and phrases denoting a certain group of people, etc. According to the results of the semantic analysis, a number of lexical units conveying the evaluation of the author as well as the protagonist’s speech have been revealed. The nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and phraseological units have been singled out. At the syntactic level, we observe the following means of evaluation: comparative, parallel and attributive constructions, parenthesis, and detached clauses as well.