POSITIVE EVALUATION OF ALIEN SPACE IN THE ENGLISH BIBLE TEX: LEXICO-SEMANTIC PECULIARITIES

Abstract

The research sets out to investigate positive evaluation in the English Biblе text. We focus on lexicо-semantic peculiarities of evaluative sentences with the deictic markers of the third person being used to manifest “alien” space. For this we consider the category of “one’s own” / “alien”, which is closely related to deixis and evaluation, single out the main features of the phenomenon and determine the rate of third person’s positive evaluation in the text. As a result of the lexicо-semantic analysis we can assert that positive qualities of the “alien” world and manifestation of the speaker’s positive attitude to it are in the focus in the English Bible text. Other varieties of onomasiological features (negative state, status) are characterized by a low frequency of manifestation, which suggests the idea that the most important parameters that determine positive evaluation are positive actions and qualities corresponding to the universally accepted ethical norms. In a number of cases the personal pronoun he is used to indicate a certain referent (God), as a result, acquires positive evaluation. In this case he develops the expression of amplification and positive evaluation and means “the one”. On the other hand, the personal pronoun they in most cases refers to strangers, people of other religions having negative evaluation. The positive evaluation of the third-person world can be verbalized metaphorically. Thus, the Lord God in the text is referred to such positive notions with the meaning of protection and salvation as “Salvation”, “The Rock”, “our help and our shield”, “my defense”, “the horn of my salvation”, “my high tower”, “a restorer of thy life”, “a buckler”. We see prospects for further study in the research of syntactic and communicative-pragmatic characteristics of "one's own”/ “alien” space as well as in the study of local and temporal markers of evaluation. Special consideration can also be given to analyzing this problem in texts of other functional styles, as well as shifting the focus of research to the field of cognitive linguistics.