PRAGMATICS OF THE SPEAKER’S EMOTIVE UTTERANCES IN THE ENGLISH EMOTIVE DISCOURSE

Анотація

Introduction. This article examines communicative manifestation of the speaker’s emotions within the emotive discourse. Purpose. The purpose of the article is to expose the nature of linguistic emotivity and to describe pragmatic features of the speaker’s emotive utterances which manifest his/her emotions in concrete communicative situations. To achieve the posed goal the following methods of linguistic analysis were applied: descriptive, contextual, pragmalinguistic, and elements of quantitative analysis.

Results. The article holds that communicative process is an integration phenomenon, a close unity of three obligatory constituents: cognitive, linguistic, and pragmatic. It is also true in relation to the speaker’s acts of speaking – always realizing a definite communicative intention, they inform about something, express the speaker’s attitude towards what is said and exert a communicative impact on the interlocutor. Emotions that typically accompany any linguistically expressed factual information are the result of appraising and evaluating. Belonging to human psyche, they receive their exposure in three different planes: mental (ontological), linguistic (semiotic), and communicative ((inter)actional). In communicative exposure, emotions can receive both direct and indirect manifestation: in the first case, they are expressed by different linguistic units of emotive semantics; in the second case, they are expressed by different contextually emotive units – non-emotive linguistic units that acquire their pragmatically determined emotivity. It means that human emotions can be expressed by practically any linguistic unit, not obligatory emotive.

The operational communicative unit that realizes the speaker’s emotions is the emotive utterance. Formally, it coincides with one or more than one actualized sentences and materializes the speech act expressive identified by a corresponding communicative intention of the speaker. The obligatory semantic features of the emotive utterance are: emotionality (which reflects the speaker’s psychological state of feeling emotions), emotivity (which is a linguistic “substitute” of emotions, their semantic interpretation), evaluation (which reflects the speaker’s assessment of a perceived object, determining the type of emotion: positive or negative) and, in most cases, expressiveness (the utterance emotional intensification). Emotivity of the speaker’s emotive utterance which, actually, identifies it as such can be represented either within this utterance or outside it. In the first case, the utterance emotivity is inherent, manifested by different linguistic means (morphological, lexical, and syntactic). In the second case, the utterance emotivity is adherent, manifested by paralinguistic (prosodic) and nonlinguistic means (haptic, proxemic, and kinesic), textually identified either by a nomination of emotion or by a description of nonlinguistic expression of emotion. The analyzed empirical data show frequent combination of inherent and adherent emotivity within one and the same emotive discourse.

Conclusion. Thus, complexity of human emotions per se correlates with complexity of their communicative exposure, where pragmatics becomes a predominant factor. Due to this very factor practically any utterance of the speaker can serve the purpose of communicative realization of his/her emotions.

Originality. Originality of this article is provided by a complex approach to theoretical generalization of pragmatic features of the emotive utterance, which contributes to the study of the emotional discourse pragmatics.

The perspective of the problem under discussion can be seen in the analysis of linguistic embodiment of emotivity and evaluation in the speaker’s emotive utterances.