ЧЕЛОВЕК В РЕЧЕВОМ ИЗМЕРЕНИИ РЕЦЕНЗИЯ НА МОНОГРАФИЮ: КАРАСИК В. И. ЯЗЫКОВОЕ ПРОЯВЛЕНИЕ ЛИЧНОСТИ. ВОЛГОГРАД: ПАРАДИГМА, 2014. – 450 С.

In his Linguistic Manifestation of Personality (2014), Professor Vladimir I. Karasik offers a new perspective on the human in the light of language as socio-cultural phenomenon and on the language from the standpoint of human values.

The metaphoric nature of the book’s title (that is stated in the author’s foreword) bears, in our view, a twofold meaning. On the one hand, any human being manifests or reveals itself in communicative practices. On the other hand, a certain individual creates a language, while a group of individuals generate discourses. In this way, language could be considered as a tool for the human, but also the human appears to be a tool for shaping the current, here and now existing language. Thus concluding our short philosophical passage provoked by the work being reviewed, we turn to analyzing its content.

In the three chapters of the book homo parlans is presented as a value-oriented (Chapter 1) linguistic personality that is actualized in the variety of discursive modes (Chapter 2) and has a need in poetic conceptualization of the world (Chapter 3). As a result, Vladimir Karasik’s approach to anthropological linguistics issues is demonstrated in the monograph to form part of an entire conceptual system which integrates and develops his ideas that have been previously delivered in his numerous publications of the recent years.

Taking value orientation as a basis for linguistic manifestation of personality, the author structures his first chapter — Value Orientations of Personality — in the following way. In the beginning he introduces and comprehensively defines the term ‘axiogenic situation’ as a unit of referential base of axiological world-image (article 1.1). Here an extensive body of texts — parables, legends, paremiological genres, and anecdotes — is given value-focused interpretation. Then, the dynamics and reformulation of traditional values are considered, with the material ranging from the biblical Decalogue to a critical reassessment of evangelic values (articles 1.2. and 1.3.). Afterwards the author analyzes transformation of traditional values, occurred due to the civilization shift in Russia’s historic development, and communicative orientations, associated with globalization processes in mass culture (articles 1.4. and 1.5.). A logical continuation to the issues under discussion comes with the lingvo-ecological diagnostics of the ‘language’s health condition’ suggested by the author (article 1.6.). In the last article (1.7.) the language itself is proposed as relevant value for linguistic personality, which is proved by everyday linguistic self-analysis directed at ‘linguistic units that require explanation and communicative actions that allow for ambivalent evaluation’ (p. 143).

The second chapter of the monograph, called Discursive Modes of Personality, presents discursive specificity of personality which is, according to Karasik, one of human’s dimensions. Discursive personality (article 2.1.) is described with the help of three-dimensional model. Firstly, in a socio-linguistic perspective, as each social character type — actor, philosopher, politician, scientist, and poet — is characterized by its own lexical-phraseological identifiers, mental patterns of subject matter thematisation, and professionally marked evaluation. Each of these properties is vividly exemplified by the author. In the second dimension, a person is recognized by its behaviour pattern and, consequently, personality could be singled out basing on pragmalinguistic criterion of communicative tonality: humorists, mockers, traditionalists, fans, etc. Thirdly, in the aspect of performativity a communicative action could be characterized as an ‘installation (performance) that is produced in order to exert one’s influence on other people’ (p. 290). To interpret discourse, according to the author, of great importance is the ability to explicate discursive emblems — such linguistic signs that serve as signs of identification for communicants and circumstances of communication (article 2.2.).

A special influence on contemporary communicative practice is exercised by media discourse (article 2.3.), manifested in ‘casual dialogue and transfuses all types of institutional communication’ (p. 202). The author characterizes its systematically important features from the standpoints of socio-linguistics and determines two main trends in the development of media discourse — its expansion into other discursive formations, and the increase of its game constituent. The description of communication tonality types that are actualized within media discourse leads the author to discuss the specificity of mass culture where ‘media-reality (especially, in computer networks) progressively displaces other types of reality’ (p. 228). While measuring the media discourse in the view of performativity, the author characterizes it in terms of action: ‘real — probable’, ‘direct — indirect’, ‘simple — magic’, ‘open — manipulative’, ‘natural — manipulational’.

Vladimir Karasik refers media-political discourse (article 2.4.) to the type of combined discourse, along with scientific-political and advertising-political discourses, and identifies its two forms: political-popular and political-analytical (p. 230). The author designates this type of discourse as a hybrid one since its ‘factual-analytical component of communication is inseparably associated with agitational-propogandistic component’ (p. 291). Entertainment discourse is discussed as a specialized type of communication (article 2.5.) that is aimed at empathetic interaction between communicants.

Discursive personality nowadays comes with a special field for self-manifestation. This field is the Internet discourse that offers a variety of means to build one’s image (article 2.6.). In his account of one of such means — the social network status messages — the author views superimposition, i.e. layering of meaning, as the cognitive mechanism of self-representation in the Internet discourse.

To conclude the chapter, Vladimir Karasik considers philological way of thinking (article 2.7.) as the basis for a specific way of communicative behaviour. A philologist thinks in a different manner from that of a mathematician and, in this way, he represents a type of discourse-generating personality that is characterized by a scholarly world perception, humanitarian conceptualization of the reality, and properly philological specificity of organization and manifestation of knowledge. All this is demonstrated in an experiment comparing argumentation belonging to representatives of different fields of knowledge and occupation.

The third chapter — Poetic Dimension of Personality — suggests a definition of linguistic personality in the perspective of artistic conceptualization of the world. ‘Poetic reflection’ (article 3.1) is defined by the author as ‘one of the means to cognize the reality or, rather, self-recognition as a participant in the great dialogue with humanity and the universe’ (p. 292). The intrinsic human need to express the experience of existence is actualized in a figurative form that contains high density of meaning. According to Karasik, the experience conveyed in such a way turns into a symbol following the cultural traditions of meaning verbalization. Verbalization of condensed meaning may also be performed in the genre of aphorism (article 3.2.).

The author of the monograph sees poetic argumentation (article 3.3.) as a specific feature of poetic impact which is aimed at convincing the addressee of genuineness and high value of some statements. To achieve that, one creates figurative claims in a form of poetic text.

The phenomenon of translator’s poetical reflection (article 3.4.) is viewed in the work as ‘commentary on commentary’: Alexander Gorodnitsky, Samuil Marshak, Vasily Trediakovsky, Grigory Kruzhkov, Vladimir Nabokov — this is not an exhaustive list of authors whose poetic conceptualization of translator’s effort is analyzed by Vladimir Karasik. The author also produces a bright interpretation of poetic masterpieces to support his argument on poetic techniques: poetic symbolization and poetic text de-linearization (articles 3.5. and 3.6.).

Poetic worldview presented in the third chapter is completed by comic miniatures (article 3.7.) which ‘selectively express the diversity of laughter-based attitude towards reality’ (p. 390).

To conclude the review of Vladimir Karasik’s monograph, it is important to mention its exceptionally balanced composition. Each of the three chapters consists of seven articles and is closed with a resume that are brought together and summarized in the Conclusion. In keeping with the character of the overall rigourous composition of the book the structure of each article is also clear-cut, and every notion in discussion, or a new term coined by the author, is provided with a comprehensive explanation, introduced into a wider scholarly context and exemplified with diverse speech material. Each article is concluded with a resume of the issues considered. The attention given to the book’s composition and structure emphasizes its value for tutors. This book could be considered as a perfect textbook for students in the fields where primary working tool is speech communication. A comprehensive bibliography provided by the author (more than 800 items) compliments the value of the monograph as a scholarly and methodological source for senior graduate students (MA and PhD levels). The book could be considered as a manual for those studying a range of disciplines in such academic programmes as Journalism, Stylistics in Mass Media (Professional Styles), Communicative Culture for Journalists, Effective Communication in Mass Media, Psychology of Mass Communication, etc.

However, the major advantage of Vladimir Karasik’s book, as is the case with all of his previous writing, lies in its thought-provoking nature.