Structures-blends verbalizing semantics of emotions

Volume 3, Number 2, 2018, P. 7–13

[ PHILOLOGICAL SCIENCES ]

Article (file: pdf, size: 177 KB, downloads: 689)

Abstract:

The paper deals with non-prototypical constructions (blends) investigation. These constructions categorize semantics of basic human emotions such as joy and surprise and comprise elements of some other prototypical constructions categorizing different situations of real life. The article reveals the idea of a combined categorization. All members of a sentence equally contribute to its semantic organization which suggests the holistic approach to a sentence study. Blends appear in the language as a result of mental spaces integration. They categorize elements of different prototypical situations that can be partially represented on the syntactical level. The constructions described in the paper reveal blending of two-three mental spaces characteristic for perception, understanding and speaking. The authors do not make it their aim to classify the resulting blends as it is hard if not impossible to follow the logic of their formation as they appear here and now at the moment of speech. Such construction can be the only of its kind and hardly appears once again. The appearance of such structures is due to the fact that real-life situations in the surrounding reality are countless, but the number of grammatical constructions is strictly limited. As a result, a speaker intuitively borrows forms from different constructions and vocabulary of various semantic groups to categorize an emergent situation.

Keywords:

emergence, construction-blend, prototypical situation, non-prototypical construction, emotion

Authors:

Tatiana V. Gorbunova, Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor of Foreign Languages Department No. 1 for Engineering Fieldsof Study, Irkutsk National Research Technical University, Irkutsk, Russia

Anastasia V. Semkova, Candidate of Philological Sciences, Associate Professor of English Philology Department, North-Eastern Federal University, Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Mirny, Russia

For citation:

Gorbunova T.V., Semkova A.V. Structures-blends verbalizing semantics of emotions. Social Competence. 2018, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 7–13. (In Russian).

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