Maksymenko I. Nominative Field "Interest" in Modern English Fictional Discourse: Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects

This thesis focuses on revealing and systematizing the semantic characteristics of "interest" nominations by organizing them within a nominative field and studying their functions and pragmatic role in modern English fictional discourse. This research offers a complex methodology of studying the nominative units designating the emotion "interest"; detects the corpus of the units comprising the field on the basis of their semantic characteristics, defines its contents and structure. The work identifies the linguo-cognitive basis of the field, studies the expressive potential of the nominative means in fiction, discriminates verbal and non-verbal means of interest expression, and summarizes their pragmatic functions. Discourse analysis outlines the situational differences in the expression of the emotion in interpersonal and mass communication. Means of interest expression are arranged into communicative strategies and tactics in correspondence with character’s communicative styles.