What makes a text interesting? Interest-evoking strategies in expository text from Russian school textbooks

The article provides the linguistics approach to the study of text-based interest. The purpose of the article is to identify the means and strategies used in expository texts from Russian school textbooks for the creation of text emotiveness. This characteristic of “an interesting text” has been repeatedly pointed out in the psychological research (Schiefele 2009). The article uses the linguistics methods of communicative and functional analysis and, in particular, the method of semantic modeling of emotive situations (Filimonova 2007). The authors’ intention “to evoke the reader’s interest” is the basis for forming an emotional-evoking type of expository discourse. The implementation of this intention is carried out through special discourse strategies called interest-evoking rhetorical strategies. Some of these strategies are based on the transmission of emotions as a special type of information in verbal interaction. In a text, this type of information is represented by emotiveness, that is, a component of text content through which the emotional states of participants of communication or characters are manifested. The article provides a description of four primary ways to create expository text emotiveness: 1) the usage of emotive insertions - commentaries made by the participant of communication acting as the subject who feels emotions; 2) the verbalization of the emotional scenario of interest for its projection to the reader; 3) the description of the characters’ emotional states; 4) the representation of “abnormal” situations (a disruption of normal and expected relations between components of a situation in the real world described in a text). The first two ways are related to the strategies of the text dialogization aimed at creating the dialogue form of an expository text, and the thematization of interest. The third way enhances the text vividness and the fourth increases its dynamics and unexpectedness for the reader.