THE INTRODUCTORY ABSTRACT AS A SPECIFIC GENRE IN ART CRITICISM DISCOURSE

Abstract. The genre of an introductory abstract is typical of institutionalized critical art discourse accepted in Russian art magazines. Speech genres in general constitute an essential part of educational practice for both text writers and translators. Among the basic prerequisites of an equivalent translation, an assumption of communicative equivalence is indispensable, which requires discourse genre parallelism in the two languages involved in translation. The international Hermitage Magazine published in English and Russian and distributed in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan not only gives material for investigating this specific art criticism genre but also serves as an example of consistent and creditable use of an introductory abstract, not uniformly accepted.

Belonging to the group of minor, or small format genres, an introductory abstract shares with them not only size characteristics but also their poly-code nature, which combines formal (layout, technical) features and linguistic textual, cognitive and lexical realization. The research presented in the conference paper studies these elements as well as the functional role of the introductory abstract. Unlike a typical academic article to a scientific paper, this abstract genre does not repeat its content or reproduce it; rather it contains part of the article, a kind of a foreword or the beginning.

Formally, the obligatory feature is spatial isolation from the body of the annotated article with the help of different typeface or lettering and setting the text within a frame. Optionally, quite often though, the abstract is accompanied by representations of art works discussed in the article. If the title carries no indication of the artwork or its author, the abstract links with the illustration to introduce the topic of the article. Linguistically there are several types of cognitive link between the abstract and the paper, such as the use of articles, cohesion with the title, or foreword information. Lexical features include art technical terms, especially indication of an art rend, proper nouns personal and geographical, emotive lexis and dates. These and other features allow qualifying this type of text as a specific genre.

Keywords: speech genres, art criticism, introductory abstract, genre features