EMOTIONALITY – EMOTIVITY – EXPRESSIVENESS: TERMINOLOGICAL MULTIVARIANCE OF EMOTIONS EXPLICATION IN FICTIONAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article studies the distinction and correspondence between such notions as emotionality, emotivity and expressiveness, which are deemed some of the most complex, contradicting and ambiguous linguistic categories used to name and characterize the emotional state and behavior of characters in fiction. As well-known, emotions accompany almost all facets of individual’s activity in their everyday life. They form the category which represents ingenuous feelings, emotional experience, and sensibility as immanent psychological states of a person. Currently the attention of linguists is paid to the investigation of personal emotional states in terms of language as a combination of linguistic, literary and psychological categories to trace the use and explication of emotive vocabulary in fictional discourse. Fiction encompassing author’s individual style appears to be an inherent, limitless, constant source of providing characters’ emotions. Within the research, it is stated that emotionality conveys psychological state of a character, emotivity is manifested by linguistic means and expressiveness becomes apparent through semantic means respectively. The study of emotional potential of a wide range of means for expressing emotions on various language levels of fictional discourse, namely, phonographic, lexical and syntactic, is effective and productive. The complex of punctuation marks (exclamatory mark, interrogative mark, dash, suspension point, period), means of font variations (font size, color and weight modifications, capitalization, hyphenation, underlining), accent and intonation means, voice tempo and timbre on phonographic level adds special emotional coloring to fictional discourse. Lexical level is characterized by lexical units (nominatives, affectives, expressives, occasionalisms, neutral and phrasal emotives, as well as synonyms, antonyms and poetic tropes) which reproduce character’s emotional state and behavior and have various emotional meanings only in a certain context. Syntactic level is presented by special syntactic constructions of the sentences (repetitions, exclamatory and interrogative sentences, inversion, ellipsis, parcelling and emphatic use of certain lexemes) that convey both the thoughts and emotional attitude to them.