Sazonova Y. The Phenomenon of Fear in Horror Texts: Theory of Reference and Sense Creation.

The work contains the linguistic pragmatic analysis of the verbal representation of the phenomenon of fear in horror texts of the Ukrainian and English-speaking lingual cultures. The work concentrates on inquiring into the relevance of subjecthood in sense creation and sense perception on the level of the author and reader’s communication in horror discourse. Theoretical aspects of the work base on general scientific visions of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Philosophic-psychological basics of understanding the phenomenon of fear are defined as the main extra-lingual factor that specifies the nature of creating and perceiving the basic fictional communicative sense «fear» and its variations in texts. Linguistic pragmatics as the theoretical-methodological basis of the research allowed this approach to the analysis of the imaginary world of horror discourse, as well as the study of the specificity of reference in it, and the interaction of the objects of reference in the expression of variations of the basic communicative sense. Studies in the field of semiotics allow formulating basic statements of defining the horror discourse and the system of building texts as its examples. Following the idea that horror discourse is a blend of literary and passion discourses, we claim that it can be considered and viewed as a bearer of the communicative fictional sense «fear» in the process of author – reader communication via belles-lettres texts. Reproducibility and universal character of horror texts is the feature of their systemic nature both in the structure and in the content side. Texts of horror discourse reflect an imaginary world with horrible ontology where the subject-source of fear and its recipient are the core of the sense creation, and subject-subject relations are the way of sense creation. We also claim that at this stage of passion discourse development subjects in a horror text are distancing from each other and are identified as a subject-source of fear and a subject-recipient of fear.