The concept of enlightenment as a structural element of the author's modality in pedagogical treatises and letters

Abstract

The article examines the concept of "enlightenment" as a key structural element of the author's modality in pedagogical treatises and correspondence of the XVIII-XIX centuries. The relevance of the research is due to the increasing interest in the historical and discursive analysis of pedagogical texts, in which enlightenment acts not only as a meaningful dominant, but also as a means of constructing the author's position and communicative influence on the addressee. The purpose of the work is to identify the features of the functioning of the concept of "enlightenment" in the speech strategies of the authors–teachers and to evaluate its role in the construction of the text modality. Theoretically, they relied on cognitive-linguistic concepts of concept and modality, as well as on the principles of representative discourse analysis. The research body consisted of 24 pedagogical treatises and more than 150 personal letters from famous enlighteners (M. Bako, A. Lagrange, I. Pestalozzi, etc.). The analysis was carried out in several stages: corpus selection and systematization of texts; identification of lexical and phraseological markers of the concept of "enlightenment"; semantic and syntactic analysis of modal constructions; identification of strategies of the author's modality. It is established that the concept of "enlightenment" performs three interrelated functions in texts: normative (presentation of the ideal of learning), evaluative (expression of the author's position through modal verbs and introductory constructions) and pragmatic (involving the reader through appeals to duty and reason). Typical modal markers are identified: "should/should", "should", "necessary", as well as conditional constructions that enhance the persuasive power of the utterance. In correspondence, the concept is more often manifested through personal and emotional assessments, whereas in treatises it is through abstract logical reasoning. The data obtained confirm the importance of the concept of "enlightenment" as the structural basis of the author's modality in the pedagogical discourse of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The results emphasize the role of modality in the historical and cultural reconstruction of pedagogical ideals and the expansion of understanding of the mechanisms of text influence on the audience. The prospects for further research are a comparative analysis of modality in pedagogical texts of different European traditions and the study of the evolution of the concept in the XIX-XX centuries.