ON THE NORMATIVE SCALE OF EVALUATION

Abstract

This study addresses two interrelated issues: first, the status of the notion of the evaluative norm, and second, the division of evaluative manifestation into positive, negative and neutral units. The author disclaims the existence of neutral evaluation and presents her own observations proving this point. The material under analysis is represented by 750 speech episodes taken from English literary discourse in which the characters express evaluation of certain objects. The linguistic analysis of the selected data has been based on the application of general scientific methods, namely: the method of and the descriptive method, as well as a special linguistic method, namely, the contextual-interpretational method. As a result, the category of evaluation is seen as the key one in both cognitive and communicative processes; it correlates with the communicants’ pragmatic-social characteristics and determines their speech behaviour. It has been noted that evaluation is characterized by selectivity: it extracts and retains the features that are important from the evaluation subject's point of view. The very fact of the evaluation process gives evidence that the object of evaluation seems valuable for a certain subject, and so it gets into the subject's zone of concern. From a multitude of various objects people evaluate those, which are significant for them at a given moment. The opposition “evaluation – nonevaluation” has been offered. If an object gets into a subject's zone of concern, the process of evaluating is sure to take place, and thus positive, negative, or mixed evaluation is produced. It has been found out that evaluation cannot be neutral: if a communicant expresses a neutral or indifferent attitude to an object, it should be considered a marker of negative or latent positive attitude. Moreover, the position of the norm as an accepted standard on the intensity scale has been reconsidered. It has been proved that the norm does not occupy the scale centre but its positive pole; thus, the evaluation scale functions in language as an asymmetric one. "Good" means corresponding to the norm, as well as indicating the qualitative enhancement of an evaluated feature, while “bad” means deviation from the norm in the direction of decreasing.