Genre-forming signs of self-presentation (based on the material of students’ self-presentation)

The article is devoted to a relatively new genre of speech – self-presentation. The research is based on self-presentations of non-philological students of the geographical, sociological, biological faculties, Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, the Institute of Physical Culture and Sports of Saratov National Research State University named after N. G. Chernyshevsky and philologists studying at the Institute of Philology and Journalism. The purpose of the study is to identify the genre features of these texts. The multidimensional analysis of self–presentations revealed genre-forming features, the most typical cognitive models (scenarios) of self-presentation, which allow us to conclude that the student’s self-presentation is a synthetic speech genre pursuing informative, imperative, evaluative goals. It can also be attributed to the genre of reaction. The genre of self-presentation interacts with other speech genres, as a rule, self-presentation includes a call, a message, gratitude. Bachelors and specialists choose a strategy – the desire to please, to seem attractive to others, Master’s students – self-advertisement, self-promotion, proving their professional competence. The choice of these strategies is related to the basic characteristics that the author defines for himself as essential: for Master’s students this is a career, for bachelors and specialists – a family, in which they live, and positive personality qualities. The article presents an overview of the forms of students’ self-presentations. Examples of atypical self-presentation are poetic texts and fairy tales, in which verbal-logical and emotionally expressive elements of speech as means of influencing the audience. Irony, jokes, puns are successfully used in students’ self-presentations, but in general the degree of seriousness within the genre is very high, for the most part self-presentations are a variant of business communication. In the works of students of all faculties, except philologists, a rhetorical technique is productive and frequent – the use of quotations and references to the opinions of famous people, philologists use lyrical reflections.

speech self-presentation, speech strategy, self-presentation scenario, rhetorical technique