Cognitive parameters of the evaluation category

Abstract

The current stage in the development of linguistics suggests that in fact the evaluation category expresses the speaker’s special attitude to what is said, to the statement, and is therefore used as a means of the communicative person’s communicative strategy. This fact gives us reason to consider this category as a communicative one, based on A. V. Bondarko’s conception on the categorical situation. It allows to enrich the research apparatus and increase the explanatory force of linguistic theory, which seeks for a communicative interpretation of language phenomena. Evaluation has a categorical status at different levels of the linguistic system and in speech - phonological, morphological, lexical, at the level of a sentence and a text. Cognitive nature of this category is represented most clearly in the text, integrating various categorical demonstrations of evaluation. So, the main attention in the studying of this category must be paid to its manifestations in the text. The concept of a cognitive character of the evaluation category gives the possibility to differentiate the representation of different segments, sections, blocks of functional-semantic field of evaluation (lexical, grammatical, etc.) in a single conception on the one hand, and to show their interconnection in a categorical situation in a single functioning system – text as a domain of the implementation of the cognitive content of evaluation, on the other.
An approach to the interpretation of the evaluation as a cognitive category makes it possible to study the diversity of lexical, grammatical and stylistic means that implement the evaluation category in a variety of communication situations in the dialectical unity. Thus, the outline of the study of the evaluation category as a cognitive category, a wide range of meanings of its representation that appears in the text, logically fits into the problem of cognitive-discursive version of the cognitive science.