The research reveals structural-semantic and communicative-pragmatic peculiarities of utterances of indignation in Modern English. It focuses on the phenomenon of indignation as a complex unity viewed from philosophical, psychological, axiological and communicative perspectives.
Indignation is akin to a righteous anger. The emotion of indignation has a propositional content – one feels indignant about something wrong that somebody has done. Indignation responds to social injustice. It discloses the wrong or offence as a moral wrong or offence. Experiencing indignation, the speakers are aware of themselves as in a position to pass moral judgement on the action or situation about which they are indignant, i.e. they are aware of themselves as in a morally superior position. Utterances of indignation are regarded as potentially conflicting.
As a result of this research, lexical means nominating indignation have been singled out, semantic and syntactic peculiarities of utterances of indignation have been determined. The basic syntactic models of utterances of indignation have been analyzed. These models are represented by declarative, interrogative, and imperative structures. The most frequent ones are: Pron/N + V be (+ not) + Adj; Pron/N + V be (+ not) (+just) + N; Why + should + Pron/N + Inf?; What/When/Where/Why/How + V auxiliary + Pron/N + Inf?; Why the hell… + would + Pron/N + Inf?; Don’t + V.
Special attention has been paid to nonverbal means of communication accompanying utterances of indignation. Paralinguistic, oculesic, kinesic, and proxemic means of communication contribute to the speaker’s actualization of indignation. Nonverbal communication plays an important role in how we convey meaning and information to others, as well as how we interpret the actions of those around us. Nonverbal means of communication convey meaning by coordinating, subordinating, identifying or contradicting verbal ones used by indignant speakers.
Pragmatic peculiarities of utterances of indignation have been revealed. According to the illocutionary goal, we consider a speech act of indignation as a hybrid speech act, the hybrid nature of which is manifested in its ability to simultaneously perform the function of expressing the emotion of indignation and the function of such speech acts as constatives, quesitives, directives, commissives, metacommunicatives, and performatives.
Communicative strategies and tactics of the expression of indignation have been investigated. The analyzed data show that indignant speakers may use persuasive, defensive, manipulative, and domineering strategies and specific tactics facilitating implementation of these strategies.
The analysis of structural-semantic and communicative-pragmatic peculiarities of utterances of indignation carried out in this work opens new prospects for future research on the phenomenon of indignation in the gender aspect.
