SPECIFIC FEATURES OF THE ENGLISH GRADABLE ADJECTIVES’ LEXICOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2019-4-85-94
The article is devoted to the investigation of ways of representing in English one of the basic universal conceptual categories – the category of graduality. The main aim is to determine specific features of lexicographic description of lexical units that express graduality implicitly in English dictionaries. Modern paradigm of linguistic knowledge – cognitive linguistics – gave an opportunity to look at a number of problems from a new angle, in particular at the formation of the category of graduality and its linguistic representation. Within the framework of cognitive linguistics graduality is rightly viewed as a concept expressed in the language by a category of graduality that includes in the first place quality adjectives because only they can denote some feature that can manifest itself in a higher or lower degr ee and as a result have gradable meanings. The article gives a short survey of present-day opinions on lexical units that express features of objects and new ways of their structural presentation, in particular opinions of leading Russian and foreign linguists – E. S. Kubryakova, N. N. Boldyrev, E. G. Beliaevskaya, L. Talmy. The investigation was carried out on the material of 533 adjectives selected from several authoritative dictionaries of the English language. The author describes the procedure of the conceptual analysis of some frequently used English quality adjectives that have an indication of graduality in their meanings. In the course of the analysis the author makes some conclusions concerning the conceptual structure of English quality adjectives representing graduality implicitly, singles out concepts that serve as a basis for the semantics of the adjectives under analysis and dwells on the peculiarities of their lexicographic description and that of relative adjectives used in their quality meanings. The study shows that the conceptual structure underlying the semantics of English adjectives representing graduality implicitly includes two concepts – “feature” and “feature degree”. The first one has a different semantic representation depending on the meaning of the adjective while the other one expresses the same feature degree in all the meanings (very high, high, low). The research is interesting for further analysis as not only the issue of lexicographic presentation of graduality is of great interest today but also the issue of new approaches and methods of studying graduality, the status of units functioning as means of expressing graduality and some others. All these issues need further investigation on the material of different languages.
Keywords: graduality, conceptual category, implicitness, conceptual analysis, quality adjectives, relative adjectives, means of representation, inference
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Issue: 4, 2019
Series of issue: Issue 4
Rubric: CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTICS
Pages: 85 — 94
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