Kryshtaliuk H. Negation in Modern American Newspaper Discourse: Functional and Linguocognitive Aspects

The thesis aims at explicating linguocognitive mechanisms underlying the functioning of negation in contemporary American newspaper discourse. Negation is treated as a cognitive-discourse phenomenon meant for altering the interreferential relations constructed in the course of the addressee's pre-textual reality conceptualization. The application of the linguocognitive analysis procedure based on the correlation between the negative semantics of lexical, morphological and syntactic units under study and the relations of sensorimotor origin has made it possible to distinguish perceptive, force and perceptive-force components of negative meaning. The perceptive meaning denotes the absence of referents in the observer's field of view. The force component represents the dynamic aspect of interrefential relations. The force-perceptive component reflects the absence of a referent that corresponds to a source or target of a force image-schema expressed by the predicate. It has been shown that in the compositional-content structure of news reports negation serves to represent the relations between the participants in a constant, variable or adversative perspective. In editorials different negative units are used as means of focusing / refocusing of interrefential relations, on the one hand, and provide a generalized representation of events, on the other.