Scholarly record

FUNCTIONAL PROPERTIES OF POSSESSIVE NOMINATIONS IN ENGLISH DISCOURSE

V. L. Malakhova

Abstract

Any social or business sphere implies interaction and relationship between people at different levels. The simplest way of setting proper relations is language. A skilled specialist should be able to use a foreign language as a tool of communication, on the one hand, and as an instrument of influencing the cognition of the partner for creation an adequate and necessary effect in the communication process, on the other. Hence a real professional should understand what kind of relationship with an interlocutor s/he wants to build and use proper language means and techniques to that end. Among a wide range of existing relations, an important place belongs to possessive relations. Studied by a great number of researchers, possessiveness is not properly analyzed from angle of interdependence with discourse. The objective of the article is to reveal the capacity of possessive nomination to form pragmasemantic possessive meanings and to influence development of discourse functional space. The author defines possessiveness as a functional and semantic category which is actualized in pragmasemantic possessive meanings of language units at different levels. The article also describes means of different language levels which express possessive relations, such as verbs of possessive semantics, possessive pronouns, and possessive grammar constructions and discloses their potential as operators of the overall sense of discourse, since the choice of this or that possessive nomination can significantly modify the communicative loading of a text. The theoretic contemplation integrating elements of the structural and semantic, functional, dynamic and systems approaches is mainly built up on the methods of the discourse functional analysis, with the support of the component analysis and systematization. The author comes to the following conclusions: 1) the discourse functional analysis reveals multisided specificity of pragmasemantic relations (including possessiveness) which play a crucial role in forming discourse semantic space; 2) the category of possessiveness presents a complex set of interdependent and interacting meanings that make up an integrated system of relations between language units; 3) despite their complex interaction, split-level language means expressing possessive relations are not always able to replace one another, as each of them has its own substantive characteristics; 4) formation of the pragmasemantic possessive meaning depends on the functional space of English discourse. Thus, the author shows the significance of studying of possessiveness from the perspective of functional linguistics for fundamental linguistic research.

Publication details

Back to publication list