Article

Name: Discourse-semantic variation of relative adjectives in English

Authors: S. A. Vinogradova

Murmansk Arctic State University Murmansk, Russian Federation

In the section Linguistics

Abstract: The paper aims at viewing the semantic features of the English denominal relative adjectives connected with their functioning in discourse. It is known that the generalized lexical meaning of the relative adjectives is a relationship between two arguments expressed by the basic and described nouns, which can be represented as «relating to...». Specification of the relationship of arguments occurs in discourse, in a concrete use. The meaning is specified in different referential uses (starry light, starry system, starry eyes). Thus, the semantics of the denominal relative adjectives can be viewed as discursively dependent, revealed in speech as a result of the interpreting activity of consciousness. The discursive variation of the semantics of the denominal relative adjectives can be attributed to the sphere of the implicit, as in linguistics the concept of «implicitness» is viewed as a reflection of the asymmetry of the content plan and the expression plan for the linguistic sign. The content of thought, in this case, tends to be much broader than its expression in linguistic units. The hidden components of meaning of denominal relative adjective may be viewed as the implicit increments of meaning. The study of contexts in which the English denominal relative adjectives were used in corpora and thesauri enabled to identify the discursive variants which, in its turn, made it possible to reconsider the existing typology of implicit semantic increments based on the probabilistic logic of denotata relations. These increments can be divided into implicational and similative according to M. Nikitin’s classification of cognitive connections of consciousness. The implicational type of relationships is the most characteristic type for the relative adjectives, it might undergo further division, since it contains argumentative (including partitive and selfargumentative) and substantive-argument relations. Among other things, such classification of implicit discursive increments of the English relative adjectives contributes to the distinction between argument-predicate and substance-indicative relative adjectives, confirming the difference in their semantic characteristics. Similative relations signal the appearance of indirect meaning in a relative adjective based on analogy. Discursive variants of the similative meaning also undergo further specification, depending on the type of analogy (of colour, taste, form, etc.).

Keywords: relative adjectives, semantic, discourse variant, increment of meaning, argumentpredicate and substance-indicative adjectives

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