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Scientific Journal “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and-Didactic Researches” Issue 4 (27), 2019 ISSN 2587-8093

When the scholars in philosophy, logic and sociology tried to understand human actions and thoughts through people’s speech, it triggered the appearance of pragmatics. Pragmatics considers language as an instrument of interaction, what people mean when they use language and how we communicate and understand each other. Pragmatics has been a field of study for many scholars abroad and in Russia (Ch.Pierce, Ch.Morris, R.Carnap, L.Wittgenstein, P.Grice, J.Austin, J.Searle, G.Leech, N.D.Arutyunova, E.V.Paducheva, I.S.Bazhenova, N.S.Valgina, V.L.Nayer etc.). Pragmatics deals with the intentional choice of language means to make an impact on the recipient in order to evoke definite feelings, ideas and behaviour; with the intention of a speaker/writer to express or conceal their feelings and thoughts in the best way, which is also one of the ways to affect the recipient. The interpretation of a litotic statement requires more information than that of syntactic structure and lexical meaning. Litotes requires that the reader refer to the ostensive situation, i.e., to the utterance’s pragmatic context, in order to perceive the disparity between the words taken literally and their intended sense [23, p. 174].

Geoffrey Leech described litotes as a case where the speaker’s description is weaker than is warranted by the state of affairs described. This peculiar feature makes it possible to use litotic statements as a means of politeness for understating impolite or critical remarks:

I w a s n’t o v e r i m p r e s s e d by her speech [8*, p. 112].

As Elizabeth McCutcheon said: “Litotes often seems to turn attention away from itself, and it can disarm potential opponents and avoid controversy; yet it emphasizes whatever it touches” [9, c. 263]. Jean Dubois in his Rhetorique generale even singles out a kind of psychological litotes, for example, a lady’s hairstyle described as “owing little to nature” signals that the hairstyle is highly indebted to her hairdresser’s art”:

Her haircut o w e s l i t t l e t o n a t u r e [9*, p. 450].

Another purpose for the use of litotes is to express irony. Raymond Gibbs underlined that litotes involve intensification, suggesting that the speaker’s feelings are too deep for plain expression. Because of their two-layer significance – superficial indifference and underlying commitment – litotes are often treated as a category of irony [24].

Laurence Horns specified some cases of litotes use, for instance, when the speaker describes something using double negations in a context in which “it would be unfair, unwise, or impolitic” to use affirmative statements, which “is so notoriously characteristic of the political and governmental domains” [19, p. 302]. Litotic statements, according to Horn, are used to indicate hesitation or uncertainty, to signal diffidence, or to express irony. He believes that hesitation, uncertainty, and diffidence are subcases of the same general motivation for the use of apparently brevity-violating prolix forms: the desire to avoid the direct expression of the positive attribute in order to leave oneself a loophole; while the ironic use of double negations is parasitic on the first two.

Geoffrey Leech singled out an interesting case of using litotes, which, referring to the main character of H.Porter’s Book Pollyanna, he called “Pollyanna Principle”, which means that people prefer to look on the bright side rather than on gloomy side of life, and in a conversation will prefer to put things in a pleasant way.

The historical review on the use of litotes as a rhetoric and literary device illustrates that litotes can be used to convey a variety of meanings: to express the importance of something or modesty of somebody, to convey sarcasm, contempt, admiration, veiled disapproval. Like other stylistic devices litotes can be used by speakers to manipulate the audience’s opinion, to create a positive image of a speaker, to create trust-based relations with recipients, to make the speech more emphatic and expressive, to make the speech more memorable and to make the informa-

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Scientific Journal “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and-Didactic Researches” Issue 4 (27), 2019 ISSN 2587-8093

tive influence more efficient. For such purposes litotes is very often used in political and media discourse.

Psychologists and cognitive scientists are unanimous in their opinion that negation makes understanding more complicated. Anvar Bakirov explains the mechanism of the impact of negative statements on human mind by suggesting readers to imagine a barking dog. The images will not fully match, but people will have a more or less similar picture of a barking dog. But if he asks readers to imagine a non-barking dog, the images will be diverse; someone will visualize a sleeping dog, a running dog, or a sitting dog, etc. The author defines the principle of cognition in the following way: as soon as we hear a word, we match it with the pattern in our conceptual framework, but if we hear a negation, it makes the work more laborious as we will have to find one pattern out of a number of them to match the negative word. The conclusion is obvious: if you want to make the process of understanding easier, try to use more affirmative statements; if you want someone to carry out your request, put it in a positive form. The more negations are used in a sentence, the more units of information they acquire making the sentence more complicated for understanding [25].

Psychoanalyst Antonio Semi underlines that the complexity of litotes lies in the fact that it is the affirmation of something through negation, but not of the simple opposite but of a multiple or submultiple of the opposite. What the author says of litotes with regard to a psychoanalyst and his patient, is true to any situation when litotic statements are used: “I believe it is easy to see how litotes can be deceptive, in the sense that they attract the analyst’s attention to this or that aspect, while it is only by studying all of these elements together that one can try to give a satisfactory answer to communication in the form of litotes” [26, p. 76].

The analysis of practical material allowed us to distinguish the following conceptual characteristics of litotes: iconicity, dynamism and conceptually two-dimensional nature.

Referring to John Haiman’s principles of iconicity (sequential order principle, proximity principle, and quantity principle), the iconic principles which may be distinguished in litotes are proximity principle, or conceptual distance that tends to match with linguistic distance, and quantity principle, which means that conceptual complexity corresponds to formal complexity [27]. The proximity principle is realized when by negating certain features and actions of a substituted object, litotes actually indirectly affirms them; trying to put it in a milder way, people who use litotes with this purpose, try to protect themselves from the negative consequences from what they said:

Mr Armani presents his clothing like this, in manner n o t d i s s i m i l a r to those shows he staged some twenty or thirty years ago [10*].

So, I am n o t a g a i n s t ministerial task forces and so on, ministerial committees, I mean all of that has its place, but I do think that the guy at the top has to be driving it the whole time [11*].

Nigel Bradley in his book Marketing research offers to use litotes as a marketing tool, that allows a strong statement to be communicated to avoid immediate reaction, “to prevent a potentially explosive situation” [28]:

…a company that has n e v e r h a d a r e p u t a t i o n for good customer satisfaction

[12*, p. 68].

The quantity principle, which means that a more complicated form represents a more complicated meaning, is carried out through the use of intensifiers. The use of intensifiers can make the meaning of the utterance stronger:

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Tybalt, for example, d o e s n o t j u s t d i e, he is utterly kicked the crap out of, Gergiev cheerily holding his hand [13*]. In this case the meaning of the litotes is intensified by the use of just.

However, litotes can express an idea in a milder way:

In all these venues we assume the dog loving customers outnumber those n o t q u i t e k e e n [14*]. The use of not quite makes the statement less categoric.

Dynamics is a universal category which is regarded from the point of different sciences. As for linguistic understanding of dynamics, it has been underlined by many scientists that language is a unique system that is prone to changes, but remains stable at the same time.

We will regard two cases of litotic statements: with double negation and single negation. Litotes with double negation can be represented as scales wavering between two characteristics, for example:

It’s n o t u n r e a s o n a b l e to expect a financial adviser to review your investments and pensions on an ongoing basis and, if so, tell you what incentives he or she is receiving from product providers [15*].

In our case the two characteristics are reasonable and unreasonable, but the presence of the particle not does not allow the meaning of the utterance to shift fully to any of them, the balance is kept somewhere in the midway between two opposites.

However, in litotes with single negation this balance is broken and the meaning shifts to the one opposite to what is used in the litotic construction (not shy – impudent):

We also know that the public are n o t s h y about making their voices heard when they decide someone deserves it [16*].

Litotes is a unique device of conceptually two-dimensional nature. Litotes do not negate the opposite, they create a new cognitive unit at the interface of two conceptual fields accumulating the characteristics of opposed units. The decoding of information enclosed in litotes is a creative process when readers have to exploit their knowledge and experience to perceive what the author means. For instance, in order to understand the litotic statement in the following example, a reader has to create a new concept which will be an overlap of two opposing concepts: popular and unpopular:

Her main profile work has been an issue that, though perhaps n o t u n p o p u l a r, has been neglected in Wales: namely eating disorders [17*].

Elisa Mattiello in her article “Understatement and overstatement: two powerful persuasive tools in English and Italian political speeches” [29, p. 159-178] indicates that in English and Italian discourse rhetoric occurs not only in the form of metaphor, but also, and persuasively, in the form of overstatement and understatement. She analyses political addresses and proves that two phenomena of overand understatement are cognitively different: the production of overstatement always involves a broadening operation, whereas the creation of understatement may involve either a broadening or a narrowing process, depending on the trope (meiosis, euphemism or litotes)). Litotes, in particular, is a vivid example of a narrowing process, when a reader or listener, who is introduced to a wider semantic space, has to create a cognitive product narrower in denotation than its lexically encoded counterparts.

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Scientific Journal “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and-Didactic Researches” Issue 4 (27), 2019 ISSN 2587-8093

Litotes has been treated cautiously by critics, writers, as well as common people. Daniel

Gross refers to litotes as “the traditionally suspect rhetorical figure” [30, p. 47]. And although

Horn appeals to consider the crucial implications in litotes, when stereotypic situations are pragmatically avoided, the use of this literary device violates one of the maxims – the Maxim of Manner, singled out by Paul Grice, - be perspicuous, avoid obscurity and ambiguity, and strive for brevity and order [31]. Being a stylistic device that avoids clarity and directness, litotes can be too vague for a reader or a listener to grasp the idea what the writer or speaker really means, and the negative construction of litotes can not be taken as affirmative, but as the one negating something that was supposed to be affirmed.

Considering this psychological trickery of litotic statements, the use of double negative statements can become a taboo in some spheres of our life, for example, people who conduct surveys or work up a questionnaire design, are strongly recommended to abstain from questions containing double negations. On the one hand, it creates unnecessary confusion in the minds of respondents, who misunderstand such questions or do not understand them at all, which leads to non-responses or wrong responses; on the other hand, researchers themselves can not accurately determine whether respondents agreed or disagreed with the statement and what they were agreeing or disagreeing to. It is strongly advisable to ask, for instance,

Is it common for boys to play football?

instead of

Do you agree that boys who play football is n o t u n c o m m o n [18*, p. 316]?

Daniel Gross suggests that literature might be especially suited for the abnormality of litotic statements because it takes definitive shape in unnatural styles, unnecessary length, and undue complexity. In literary works a lot of poets and writers have used litotes to convey strange and vivid images, it is a good tool to touch upon the indelicate in an unobtrusive and inoffensive way, or to avoid giving a direct description of a character or a place, making readers’ imagination work. However, this complicated nature of litotes and the mental work that must be done to perceive the meaning of a litotic statement evoked some authors’ resignation and unwillingness to use litotes as a rhetoric or literary device. George Orwell in his essay

“Politics and the English language” stood against unclear language reflecting unclear thought. By way of a good cure for the excessive use of “not un-“, which is considered to be a classical format of litotes, he suggested memorizing the following sentence:

A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field [19*, p. 259]

Thus, he encouraged speakers to reveal their thoughts in more direct statements [32]. Litotes and other means of expressing understatement are found in many languages and

cultures, in all types of discourses and not only in a written, but a colloquial speech as well. Litotic statements are characteristic features of daily conversations:

The food was n o t b a d.

A million dollars is n o s m a l l amount.

I c a n n o t d i s a g r e e with you.

She w a s n’ t a b a d d a n c e r [20].

The article “Is the British art of understatement ever so slightly dying out?” that appeared in The Guardian news blog on November 13, 2017, referring to the research into British and

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American English by Paul Baker, a professor at Lancaster University, expressed concern on the fact that the British, being reserved by nature, who are not allowed to express passionate feelings and who thus have become world champions of understatement, are nowadays more inclined to use shorter, less formal and more clear statements. This article triggered a heated discussion and a lot of readers stood for understatement as a salient feature of the British English, saying that “The language would be poorer without such linguistic dexterity” which “is civilized and is the equivalent of speaking quietly, when everyone else is shouting” [33].

Conclusion

Litotes is a device which takes its origin in the antique rhetoric tradition and has been an object of study by many scientists during the whole period of establishing linguistics as a science. Having a long history, litotes has been treated cautiously and has got contradictory interpretations due to the complicated nature of this device. The first difficulty lies in distinguishing litotes from the related concepts, such as understatement, meiosis, irony and euphemism. And although litotes is a special way of expressing understatement, which is taken as a national trait of British people, its double negative structure is not typical to a literary form of the English language. Moreover, double negation in a litotic statement can be expressed not only through the use of two negative units, very often one negative unit is accompanied by a positive one, which acquires a negative meaning in a context.

Contextual interpretation of litotes requires certain linguistic proficiency and skills, as well as intellectual efforts, for the correct interpretation of litotic statements. Litotes do not fulfill the logical law of double negation, which implies that two negative components cancel each other and make the statement affirmative. The interpretation should go further than the proposition of the classical logic that A equals not (not A), but presupposes a number of possibilities and multiple inferences that lie between two polar propositions and depend on the context. Litotes contradict two maxims which Paul Grice worked out for cooperative conversation: the Maxim of Quality, that requires the speaker to tell the truth, and the Maxim of Manner, which requires the speaker to be clear, brief, to avoid obscurity of expression and ambiguity, as litotes is an appropriate means of expressing the speaker’s point of view in a vague way.

The contradictory nature of litotes significantly broadens its application and widens the meanings it can reveal. Litotes is used to express both understated and categorical statements, the importance and modesty of something or someone, to sound polite and ironic or sarcastic, to convey admiration and disapproval, to accept a compliment or express insult. The implied meaning of a litotic statement lays not so much on the formal level but on the strategic level that underlies the selection of forms.

The decoding of information enclosed in litotes is a complicated cognitive and creative process which lies in the fact that a person operates with two conceptual fields and creates a new one by using narrowing mechanism.

No matter that litotes being a device of a complicated nature has found its advocates and opponents, it remains a very popular stylistic device in all types of literary and colloquial discourses, and presents and interesting object for further investigation.

References

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[2]St.Augustine, the orator/ A study of the rhetorical qualities of St.Augustine’s sermones ad populum/ A dissertation by Sister M.Inviolata Barry, A.M. of the Sisters of Divine Providence, San Antonio, Texas, The Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., 1924.

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[3]Medieval literature and historical inquiry: Essays in honor of Derek Pearsall//edited by D.Aers, D.S.Brewer, Cambridge, 2000. – 212 s.

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[4]Anglo-Saxon emotions: reading the heart in Old English language, literature and culture//edited by A.Jorgensen, F.McCormack, J.Wilcox, Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, London and New York, 2016. –318 s.

[5]Litotes in Old Norse, Lee M.Hollander//PMLA, Vol.53, No.1 (Mar., 1938). – с. 1 –

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[6]Green D.H. Irony in the Medieval romance, Cambridge University Press, 1979. – 431

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[7]Grant P. Literature and the discovery of method in the English Renaissance, Springer, 1985. – 188 s.

[8]Greenblatt S. Renaissance self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare, University of Chicago Press, 2012. – 332 s.

[9]McCutcheon E. Denying the contrary: More’s use of litotes in the Utopia/Essential articles for the study of Thomas More, ed. R.S.Sylvester and G.P.Marc’hadour, Hamden,

Conn.:Archon Books. 1977 – s. 263 – 271.

[10]Pope A. The works of Alexander Pope, Esq., v.4, C.Bathurst, 1787. – 314 s.

[11]Smith J. The mystery of rhetorick unveiled, R.Wilkin, 1721. – 195 s.

[12]Puttenham G. The arte of English Poesie, Triphook, 1811. – 258 s.

[13]Akhmanova О.S. Kurs prakticheskoy stilistiki sovremennogo angliiskogo yazyka: Moskva, Izdatelstvo Moskovskogo universiteta, 1978. – 157 s.

[14]Arnold I.V. Stilistika. Sovremenniy angliiskiy yazyk: Moskva, Izdatelstvo «Flinta», 2002. – 384 s.

[15]Galperin I.R. Ocherki po stilistike angliiskogo yazyka: Moskva, Izdatelstvo literatury na innostrannih yazykah, 1958. – 458 s.

[16]Evsina М.V. Dvoinoye otritsaniye v prostom predlozhenii [tekst]: dissertacija na soiskanie uchenoj stepeni kandidata filologicheskih nauk: 10.02.04: zashhishhena 15.04.06: utv.05.10.06/ Evsina Marina Vladimirovna. – Tula, 2006. – 159 s.

[17]Glazkova М.Ju. Ekspressivnij sintaksis v sovremennoj publitsistike: na materiale russkoyazychnih i angloyazychnih analiticheskih obshhestvenno-politicheskih statei [tekst]: dissertacija na soiskanie uchenoj stepeni kandidata filologicheskih nauk: 10.02.19: zashhishhena 20.06.10: utv.05.12.11/ Glazkova Marina Yuryevna. – Rostov-na-Donu, 2010. – 221 s.

[18]Len’ko G.N. Vyrazheniye kategorii emotivnosti v hudozhestvennih proizvedeniyah frantsusskih, angliiskih i nemetskih avtorov kontsa XX – nachala XXI vekov [tekst]: dissertacija na soiskanie uchenoj stepeni kandidata filologicheskih nauk: 10.02.20: zashhishhena 25.06.11: utv.20.12.12/ Len’ko Galina Nikolaevna. – Moskva, 2011. – 189 s.

[19]Horn L. A natural history of negation, Leland Stanford Junior University, 2001. –

637 s.

[20]Wouden van der Ton Negative contexts: collocation, polarity and multiple negation, Routledge, 2002. – 320 s.

[21]Farnsworth W. Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric, David R. Godine Publisher,

2011. – 253 s.

[22]The Princeton handbook of poetic terms/edited by R.Greene, S.Cushman, Princeton University Press, 2016. – 456 s.

[23]Leech G. Principles of pragmatics, Routledge, 2016. – 264 s.

[24]Gibbs R. The poetics of mind: figurative thought, language and understanding, Cambridge University Press, 1994. –527 s.

[25]Bakirov А. NLP. Roli, kotoriye igrayut lyudi: Piter, 2002. – 260 s.

[26]Semi A. The conscious in psychoanalysis, Routledge, 2018. – 145 s.

[27]Haiman J. Natural syntax: iconicity and erosion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. – 293 s.

[28]Bradley N., Marketing research: tools and techniques, OUP Oxford, 2013. – 552 s.

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[29]The Languages of Politics / La politique et ses langages // eds. Degani, M., Frassi P., Lorenzetti M.I., Cambridge Scholars Publishing, vol.1, 2016. – 335 s.

[30]Gross Daniel Preston S. Uncomfortable situations: emotion between science and the Humanities, University of Chicago Press, 2017. – 182 s.

[31]Grice H.P. Logic and conversation/Syntax and semantics 3: Speech arts, Cole et al., 1975. – s. 41 – 58.

[32]Orwell J. Politics and the English language: Horizon, vol.13, issue 76 – GB, London, 1946. – s. 252 – 265.

[33]Is the British art of understatement ever so slightly dying out?, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2017/nov/13/british-art-understatement- decline-american-english (vremya obrashhenija 15.09.2019).

Analyzed sources

[1*] India F1: a chance on the big stage, URL: https://www.ft.com/content/6c1d7e86- 257b-3911-92c0-83726328071c (vremya obrashhenija – 10.11.2019).

[2*] Chesterton G.K. Tremendous Trifles, The Floating Press, 2011. – 191 s. [3*] Hornby N. How to be good, Penguin UK, 2005. – 256 s.

[4*] China’s hopes for the Beijing Olympics, URL: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/6215803/Chinas-hopes-for- the-Beijing-Olympics.html (vremya obrashhenija – 03.10.2019).

[5*] Golden E. John Gilbert: The Last of the Silent Film Stars, University Press of Kentucky, 2013. – 384 s.

[6*] Ellis M. Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, Routledge, 2017. – 1840 s.

[7*] Former Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp returns to football with old club Bournemouth, URL: http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/football-league/former- tottenham-manager-harry-redknapp-returns-to-football-with-old-club-bournemouth- 8117786.html (vremya obrashhenija – 12.11.2019).

[8*] Leech G. Principles of pragmatics, Routledge, 2016. – 264 s.

[9*] Gibbs R. The poetics of mind: figurative thought, language and understanding, Cambridge University Press, 1994. – 527 s.

[10*] Giorgio Armani: the show must go on, URL: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/giorgio-armani-the-show-must-go-on- 416822.html (vremya obrashhenija – 11.09.2018).

[11*] Daily catch-up: learning from the only Labour leader to win a working majority in the past 49 years, URL: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/daily-/catch-up- learning-from-the-only-labour-leader-to-win-a-working-majority-in-the-past-49-years- 10314946.html (vremya obrashhenija – 11.09.2018).

[12*] Bradley N. Marketing research: tools and techniques, OUP Oxford, 2013. – 552 s.

[13*] Gergiev’s wild interpretation, URL: http://blogs.telegrath.co.uk/culture/igortoronuilalic/3687081/gergievs_wild_interpretation (vremya obrashhenija – 18.08.2018).

[14*] Dogs really are capable of loving their owners, research suggests, URL: https://independent.co.uk/news/science/dogs-really-are-capable-of-loving-their-owners- research-suggests-9291194.html (vremya obrashhenija – 15.10.2019).

[15*] 10 tips to spot rip off financial advice, URL: https://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ianmcowie/100008791/10-tips-to-spot-rip-off-financial- advice (vremya obrashhenija – 04.05.2016).

[16*] Who is the fairest in Hollywood celebrities face new moral pressure, URL: http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/08/21/who-is-the-fairest-in-hollywood-celebrities-face- new-moral-pressure (vremya obrashhenija – 16.08.2018).

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[17*] Bethan Jenkins: just don’t call her a sell out, URL: http:blogs.independent.co.uk/2010/06/16/bethan-jenkins-just-dont-call-her-a-sell-out (vremya obrashhenija – 16.07.2017).

[18*] Bradley N. Marketing research: tools and techniques, OUP Oxford, 2013. – 552 s. [19*] Orwell J., Politics and the English language: Horizon, vol.13, issue 76 – GB, Lon-

don, 1946. – s. 252 – 265.

Dictionaries used

[1**] Mikhelson А.D. Ob’yasnitelniy slovar’ innostrannyh slov, Tipo-lit. “Russkaya”,

1891. – 752 s.

[2**] Kul’tura russkoy rechi. Entsiklopedicheskiy slovar’-spravochnik: pod ruk. L.Ju.Ivanova, А.P.Skovorodnikova, Е.N.Shiryaeva: Moskva, Izdatelstvo «Flinta», 2011. – 840 s.

UDC 801.316.6=802.0

APPELLATIVE TYPE OF ENGLISH GERONTOLOGICAL PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS WITH NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE SEMANTIC CONTENT

Yu.S. Konovalova

____________________________________________________________________________

Voronezh State Technical University,

Ph.D. in Philology, Senior Lecturer of the Department of Foreign Languages and Technology of Translation Yulia S. Konovalova

e-mail: [e-mail]

____________________________________________________________________________

Statement of the problem. The presented article deals with the appellative type of gerontological phraseological units with pejorative and meliorative semantic content in the English linguistic world picture. The specific nation- al-cultural features of the gerontological concept “Old age” in the English language world picture in cognitive and semantic aspects are investigated.

Results. The appellative type of English phraseological units with the component “old” (in the amount of 61 units) is analyzed. Negatively and positively connotated subtypes of appeals to women (wives), men (husbands), relatives, friends (acquaintances), etc. were identified. The study of the phraseologically objectified cognitive signs of the “Old age” concept shows that the historical consciousness of people, reflected in English phraseological units, mainly conceptualizes pejorative-marked forms of references.

Conclusion. Based on the analysis of the appellative type of gerontological phraseological units, it was concluded that for English linguistic and cultural community, old age is more a negative and unpleasant age period, which is characterized by painful conditions, anger at the outside world, spoiled character, melancholy, etc. However, it should be noted that not all cultures have advanced age with pronounced negative traits and signs.

Key words: concept, linguistic consciousness, semantic-cognitive analysis, old age, phraseological unit, appellative type, assessment, pejorative, meliorative, seme, symbol, image.

For citation: Konovalova Yu.S. Appellative type of English gerontological phraseological units with negative and positive semantic content / Yu.S. Konovalova // Scientific Journal “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and- didactic Researches”. – 2019. - № 4 (27). – P. 21-31.

Introduction

Aging of population is one of the dominant trends of the 21st century, as noted in the

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© Konovalova Yu.S., 2019

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summary of the joint report of the United Nations Population Fund and the Help International organization [1, p. 3]. This process has important and far-reaching consequences for all aspects of society. The process of aging of population that has been developing in the world for more than a decade has a global impact not only on demographic, but also on social and economic development [2, p. 236]. Gerontology studies the general processes of aging of the body, taking into account the entire individual development as a whole, all the biological aspects of age dynamics; so, it is the science of age-related processes ending in old age and death [3, p. 7].

Let`s consider a more detailed interpretation of the term “gerontology”. Gerontology (from the Greek. Γέροντος - “old man” and Λόγος - “knowledge, word”) is a science that not only studies the aging process, but also considers how to prolong the life of an elderly person and improve its quality [1*]. It should be noted that the basis of gerontology is the biology of aging, but the problem of aging is inherently complex: biomedical, psychological, anthropological, social, economic. It was formed and continues to develop at the junction of various fields of knowledge [4, p. 48].

Senile age and attitude to it differs among representatives of a linguistic and cultural community. For example, it is generally accepted that in Europe pensioners and elderly people lead an active lifestyle, travel a lot, do what they love, learn foreign languages, have fun in the company of friends and acquaintances. According to common stereotypes, in Russia, old people mostly visit medical institutions, do household chores and sometimes allow themselves such small joys as traveling over short distances, gardening, reading.

Over time the attitude towards old age in society has changed. If in the last century “senile grey hair” aroused respect and humility among the younger generation, in the modern world, which is considered to be juvenile, young people often feel irritation, condescension and even hostility towards older people. This is due to the inevitably changed behavior and the spoiled character of old people (grouchy appears, a desire to teach and give advice to everyone, excessive tearfulness and sentimentality, depressed state, a feeling of loneliness and uselessness).

Old age, along with other age categories, plays an important role in the person`s life cycle: old people analyze mistakes made in youth, summarize the life lived, pass on their experience and knowledge to the younger generation.

In different historical periods many philosophers, culturologists, linguists and sociologists studied youth and old age. So, St. Augustine, Mark Thulius Cicero, Francesco Petrarch, Voltaire, Francis Bacon and others devoted a lot of works to the study of age categories. [5, p. 24]. In the modern linguistic space the problems of youth and old age are investigated by D.A. Saleeva, O.V. Bakhmet, O.A. Avdeeva, A.A. Pintova, P.A. Shcherbo, Z.E. Fomina, Yu. S. Konovalova [6].

The studied phenomenon “Old age” is described in many types of English folk art, particularly in sayings, proverbs, tales, aphorisms, songs. As the investigation showed, concept

“Old age” is often verbalized by English phraseological units with the seme “referring to someone”.

Research methodology

According to A. Vezhbitskaya, linguistic consciousness has many different levels; it contains both facts lying on the surface and facts that are hidden very deeply [7, p. 244]. Of course, the concept “Old age” has a certain internal content. Like many other concepts, it has its own stock of features that distinguish the bearer of the English culture.

Based on the foregoing, the purpose of this article is semantic and cognitive analyzes of the appellative type of gerontological phraseological units with negative and positive semantic content, as well as determination of their national and cultural specificity in the aspect of correlation of phraseological units with their function - to objectify the concept “Old age” in the English world picture.

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Scientific Journal “Modern Linguistic and Methodical-and-Didactic Researches” Issue 4 (27), 2019 ISSN 2587-8093

According to the purpose, we used a number of research methods, including semantic, conceptual, descriptive and stylistic analyzes.

The subject of the research is the gerontological concept “Old age” in the English phraseological world picture.

The object of consideration in this work is the appellative type of phraseological units with the component “old” (61 units are investigated).

The research material was English phraseological units with the key lexical item “old”, obtained by the method of continuous sampling from the English-language dictionaries and Internet resources (a list of analyzed sources is attached).

Research results

It is interesting to note that the appellative type is structured by different types of phraseological units, which differ in their semantic content. For example:

1)the feminine subtype (with the seme “woman, wife”);

2)the masculine subtype (with the seme “man, husband”);

3)the cognate subtype (with the family “relatives”);

4)the mythological subtype (with the seme “supernatural images”);

5)the interpersonal subtype (with the seme “friendship”).

Among the mentioned subtypes, we have identified (according to quantitative and emo- tive-value criteria) pejorative-connotated and meliorative-connotated subtypes of appeals [5, p. 110].

In quantitative terms, a special place is occupied by the pejorative-connotated subtypes of appeals (40 examples), which significantly prevail over phraseological units with a meliorative semantic content (21 examples).

Let's look at the data in table № 1.

Table № 1

Negatively connotated semantic types and subtypes		Number of units
of phraseological units with the “old” component
	Appellative type of phraseological units	40
1.	feminine subtype	13
2.	masculine subtype	12
3.	cognate subtype	8
4.	mythological subtype	7
	Total amount	40

As it can be seen from table № 1, the English phraseological corpus contains a voluminous layer of appellatives (40 units), which are mainly characterized as negatively colored. In the presented type, the examples reflect the emotional and personal attitude to:

woman (spouse);

man (spouse, father, grandfather);

parents;

relatives;

enemies.

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