Published 2020-11-04
Keywords
- conceptual content, literary discourse, force gestalts, balance loss of a character, norm, convergence of negations
Abstract
The purpose of the article is to study the role of negation in the representation of the concept BALANCE in the modern American stories.
The methods of component, contextual-interpretative and conceptual analysis are employed.
Results. It was found out that the linguistic reflection of the concept BALANCE is determined by one’s sensorimotor experience, which includes pre-conceptual ideas about the balance of the body, and can be represented by lexical and grammatical means, one of which is negation. It was revealed that the negation reflects a certain value conflict in the mind of the characters in the stories studied, the inconsistency of the obtained information to the system of knowledge about the world they acquired. Regarding the fact that the loss of balance is the result of force, which disrupts the stability of the human condition, we correlated the negations with force gestalts, which were used to model the personages’ balance loss. The result of balance loss is a deviation from the VERTICAL, which is correlated with the deviation from the norm, because, firstly, any violation is considered as non-compliance with a certain norm, and secondly, having a general context of opposition as a basis, negation signals about non-compliance with the expected real. Thus, the role of negation as a means of expression of the studied concept is to reveal the physical, psychological and social perspectives of the image of the character in the modern American stories.
Conclusions. Negations are correlated with the description of the physiological, emotional states of the characters and their social status, which determines the type of the lost balance. Negative adjectives in parallel with nouns are the skeleton elements of the text, which we interpret as the main carriers of information about balance loss of the characters in the stories analyzed. The convergence of negations as a means of balance loss representation in small passages of the stories creates the effect of a gradual, however, total loss of balance and characterizes the described situation as desperate. Thus, the concept BALANCE in the studied prose is actualized in dynamics, due to the development of the personages’ images, which are characterized by the initial balance and its loss.