POLYSEMY OF EMOTIVE UNITS IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH: SEMANTIC DIFFUSENESS AS A MECHANISM OF MEANING VARIATION

Abstract

The article examines the polysemy of emotive units in contemporary English and argues that their semantic variability is best described through the notion of semantic diffuseness. In the present study, semantic diffuseness is not treated as an autonomous theory or as a universal explanatory formula. It is used as an analytical term referring to the partial overlap of emotive, evaluative, epistemic, and interactional functions within a single linguistic form. The relevance of the topic is conditioned by the fact that, in present-day English, units such as wow, oh, great, fine, and seriously no longer function exclusively as direct verbal markers of emotion. In actual discourse, they may express emotional reaction, signal evaluation, mark the speaker’s stance, mitigate or intensify utterances, regulate interpersonal alignment, and organize discourse progression. For this reason, their meanings cannot be reduced either to a single lexical invariant or to a mechanically enumerated list of dictionary senses. The aim of the article is to determine how the overlap of lexical meaning and discourse function gives rise to related but distinct senses in contemporary English emotive units. The study is theoretical and analytical in character. It synthesizes current research on polysemy, interjections, emotivity, and corpus pragmatics and applies semantic-discursive analysis to a set of recurrent English units that are especially sensitive to context, position, and prosody. The analytical procedure includes four steps: identifying the lexical semantic core of the unit, establishing its discourse position, determining its evaluative orientation, and specifying its interactional function in context. The analysis shows that the meaning variation of emotive units is conditioned primarily by the type of emotion conveyed, the degree of emotional force, evaluative polarity, interactional role, and position within the utterance or turn. On this basis, the article demonstrates that emotive polysemy should be understood not as accidental contextual fluctuation, but as a regular result of semantic-pragmatic redistribution. The theoretical value of the study lies in refining the description of emotive meaning in English. Its practical value lies in its relevance for lexicography, discourse analysis, translation studies, and linguistically informed annotation of language data.