| Abstract [eng] |
The final paper examines evaluative vocabulary in Lithuanian and Italian book reviews. Male and female speech differences were noticed a long while ago, and genderlect term was first coined by Deborah Tannen (1990). Deborah Cameron (1998) studied male and female conversations, Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker (1998) explored what determines male and female miscommunication; Robin Lakoff (1975) identified specific gender differences in speech, Fern Johnson together with Elizabeth Aries (1998) analysed how women talk in court, and Lori Labotka (2009) researched even homosexual speech features. Therefore, as can be seen from abundant theoretical and empirical sources, masculine and feminine talking has been widely researched previously and is still explored all around the world. In Lithuanian sources, the topic of genderlect is relatively rare. Attention to masculine and feminine language features was given by Rūta Marcinkevičienė (2001) and Reda Galinskaitė (2007) in their article “Consent strategy in conversations: functions and expression", and "Consent strategy in conversations among young people”. There were also other types of articles which explored social factors influencing different genderlects (Abromavičius, Daugirdaitė, Germanavičiūtė 2003). Evaluative language in texts for several decades was explored by numerous foreign researchers (Bednarek, 2006, Bell, 1988; labov, 1991;Thompson and Hunston, 2000, Toolan, 1972, etc.). According to their definitions, evaluation is defined as a certain meaning of words or phrases, by which the author expresses his or her attitude, opinion, position to a particular event, situation, phenomenon or person. Up till now, researchers from all over the world have mainly focused on gender conversation strategies and communication models. In Lithuania, more emphasis was given to psychological and sociological factors, gender position in society and politics, whereas differences in language expression were not widely analysed. Masculine and feminine style of speaking from the evaluation perspective, by comparing reviews written in Lithuanian and Italian, has not been studied. Worth of mentioning is a doctoral thesis by Birutė Ryvitytė "Evaluation in English and Lithuanian Linguistic Book Reviews” (2008), but it researched and compared the expression of evaluation in Lithuanian and English science book reviews. Also worth of mentioning is Bachelor's thesis "Evaluation expression in Lithuanian Book Reviews” (2015) by the same author. However, in the latter work, an attempt is made to move away from semantics and go deeper into the statistics obtained from Lithuanian book reviews, besides, it lacks the comparison aspect. So it is fair to say that the subject of the final paper, Evaluation in Italian and Lithuanian Book Reviews, is a relatively new and little explored area. The main aim of this research is to figure out the differences in masculine and feminine evaluation expressions found in Lithuanian and Italian book reviews. To achieve this, the following tasks are set: to determine what lexical units, in book reviews, are used by Italian men and Italian women, to divide lexemes into positive / negative communication assessment, to investigate which words are used in the literal and which in figurative meaning, and to compare with Lithuanian evaluation vocabulary usage. In order to carry out the study, two corpora of 100 000 words were created, they were analysed using corpus linguistics approach, quantitative and qualitative content analysis and comparative analysis. After the analysis of selected texts, it was concluded that all subjects used quite different evaluative vocabulary. Women, both Lithuanian and Italian, used more evaluative words than men, they used more evaluative words in a figurative sense, their evaluation often was less categorical and straightforward than that by men. The research could benefit stylistic professionals and contribute to further genderlect research. |
