Litvinov O. Semantic, Cognitive, and Pragmatic Features of Characters’ Eye Behaviour Denominations (A Study of Contemporary English-Language Fiction).

The thesis offers an integrated research of denominations designating characters’ eye behaviour as a nonverbal communication component in contemporary English-language fiction viewed from cognitive, discursive, communicative, and functional perspectives. The thesis establishes a range of eye behaviour denominations in Modern English and elucidates their communicative value, as well as their role in fictional discourse.The denominations under study have been classified according to their structural, semantic, sememic, and referential characteristics. Semantic and cognitive features of eye behaviour denominations have been described in terms of deep cases’ theory and conduit metaphor. Discursive functions and pragmatic potential of the denominations under analysis have been outlined, their speech-act specificity has been determined for certain types of communicative situations, objective and subjective factors of their pragmatic variability in modern English-language fiction discourse have been revealed.