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1УДК 81
Toylieva B.
Senior teacher at the Department of Foreign Languages Turkmen State Institute of Economics and Management (Ashgabat, Turkmenistan)
THE USE OF WORD COMBINATIONS WITH QUALITATIVE ADJECTIVES IN ENGLISH FICTION
Аннотация: article deals with the issues related to the ability of English relative adjectives to pass into the category of qualitative adjectives and convey implicit meanings in an utterance. Particular attention is paid to adjectives denoting nationality (such as English, British) and terms denoting the corresponding linguistic and cultural concepts - Englishness (English identity) and Britishness (British identity).
Ключевые слова: graduality, cognitive linguistics, parts of speech, prototypical category, degree of feature manifestation, relative adjectives.
The problem of implicitness has been studied in linguistics for a long time, and it has always been especially relevant for stylistic research.
In the theoretical literature, implicitness is interpreted differently depending on what the researcher believes underlies it and at the linguistic level that she has discovered. In the most general terms, implicitness in speech is understood as the presence of a hidden semantic statement, which is derived by the participants in a communicative act from explicitly expressed information with the involvement of background knowledge.
Studying the semantics and functioning of English adjectives, in particular relative adjectives used in qualitative meanings, we pay special attention to the study of their ability to convey implicit meanings in a statement, that is, to act as means of expressing implicitness.
The cognitive approach made it possible to create a new concept of parts of speech, which is based on the postulate that the syntactic and discourse functions of individual parts of speech are not simply correlated with their lexical meanings, but in prototypical cases of the creation and use of words are consistent with each other. Within the framework of the cognitive paradigm, the part-speech category acts as a natural, prototypical and, therefore, cluster category, combining different types of features of units of the set and bringing them into a single gestalt.
This point of view is shared by N. N. Boldyrev, who emphasizes that categorical membership in this case is determined not by a rigid set of characteristic features that are mandatory for all members of a given category, but by the presence of only a few or even one of them. Thus, within the framework of the cognitive approach, the category of adjectives appears as a category of prototypical type, which combines qualitative and relative adjectives.
Speaking about the typical features of adjectives, which qualitative adjectives fully possess, they call first of all their ability to form degrees of comparison and combine with adverbs of degree such as very, too, enough or quite, pretty or rather, etc.
In our opinion, it is possible to formulate the prototypical properties of adjectives through the prism of the category of graduality: since prototypical adjectives denote a feature that can be manifested to a greater or lesser extent, they have gradable meanings, in English, prototypical adjectives express gradualism primarily explicitly - using degrees of comparison of qualitative adjectives and phrases with adverbs of degree.
Currently, scientists also note that relative adjectives can develop qualitative meanings and, thus, become qualitative adjectives. Moreover, researchers believe that the use of relative adjectives in a qualitative sense in Russian is a productive process and that most English relative adjectives are also capable of becoming qualitative.
As for English relative adjectives denoting nationality, such adjectives still do not have degrees of comparison, they do not have synonyms and antonyms, and in this regard they do not lend themselves to scaling as a mechanism providing horizontal
semantic division, since it is impossible to grade those complex meanings which these adjectives convey. It seems that in this case the comparison is made with a certain complex standard as the norm for a given type of object.
In terms of modern English, the results of the study indicate that the process of modus (interpretive) recategorization continues in the category of adjectives. In particular, relative adjectives are increasingly used in a qualitative sense. For a number of reasons, this process has its own specific features, and its further detailed study is necessary with the involvement of all possible sources (lexicographical, textual, discursive, etc.).
СПИСОК ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ:
1. Kubryakova, Ye. S. (1997). Chasti rechi s kognitivnoy tochki zreniya = Parts of speech from the cognitive point of view. Moscow: IYA RAN. (In Russ.);
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