Mingoraieva A. Semantic-syntactic and Communicative-functional Peculiarities of Opposition in the English, German, French, Russian, and Ukrainian Fiction in the Early XXI Century

This thesis focuses on the comparative study of the category of opposition in the languages with different structures and degree of relationship: Germanic (English, German), Romance (French) and Slavic (Ukrainian, Russian). Opposition is defined as a verbal category which expresses a relation of opposite and is characterized by a clearly organized system consisting of a referent, time and space correlation, and a way of the implementation in the language. In the five languages studied, adversative constructions are mostly used with one referent (1362 units / 79.7%); this means constructions which represent the features opposition of one referent and which do not overload the content of the expression implementing its communicative goal. Adversative constructions with several referents are not so commonly used (347 units / 20.3%) and are more complicated on a compositional level.