“Otherˮ in the Genre ‘Letter to the Editor’

Author’s name:

Tatiana Sineokova

Abstract:

Scholars see dialogue as the primary natural form of language communication; monologue is recognized as secondary to dialogue. The purpose of this article is to analyze the texts of the genre ‘Letter to the Editor’ (LTE) in terms of material presence in them of “the otherˮ as a signal of the dialogic category manifestation in the monologic text. The hypothesis is that in LTE texts “the other” – the addressee, vis-à-vis of the LTE subject – is not only implied, but actually materially, verbally explicated. The novelty of the study is determined by the choice of the approach, which makes the dialogic category overt at the level of not only the deep, but also of the superficial structure. The choice of research material and methods in this study is conditioned by M. Bakhtin’s understanding of dialogue as a universal property of speech. In monologic speech one is met with dialogue in the broader sense of the word, which may be understood as the mutual relationship, interaction between the position of the addresser and the addressee. The material for the research was taken from the corpus of texts assigned to the LTE genre and published by British daily periodicals, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Independent. LTE is an essential and integral part in the generic system of media discourse as it invites feedback from the recipient. In order to achieve the intended objective of this research project, the author identified dialogic markers in the monologic text at textual, grammatical and lexical levels, extrapolating distinctive linguistic features from the dialogic form of speech into the monologic form of speech. The study has shown that a wide range of endodialogic markers, from pretextual (morphological, syntactical, lexical) to textual (architectonic) levels, manifests the presence of “the otherˮ in the monologic text. The results of the study have theoretical significance for a number of related areas of modern linguistics and, above all, media discourse (in terms of projecting the institutional and role-specific aspects), linguistic genre studies (in relation to the genre-forming specificity of the addressee), linguistic pragmatics (the addressее factor in the light of situational conventions), etc. Practically, these research results may be used in teaching specialized courses of the university curricula.

Section LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
DOI: 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2020-50-2-75-90
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Key words genre; monologue; dialogic marker; dialogic category; media discourse.

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