The thesis investigates the linguistic means of expressing negation in the English language based on British psychological online thrillers from a communicative and pragmatic perspective. The linguistic, communicative, pragmatic, and stylistic nature of negation is defined, and its place within contemporary linguistic studies and literary discourse is specified. The study identifies the peculiarities of negation functioning as a means of conveying implicit intentions, manipulative influence, creating psychological tension, and facilitating the reader’s cognitive engagement. A semantic-pragmatic typology of negation is proposed, encompassing explicit, implicit, conditional, double, presuppositional, metalinguistic, and silent negation. The concept of pragmatic silence is substantiated as a form of implicit negation, while the role of silent negation in written literary discourse is determined. It is demonstrated that negation functions not only as a grammatical category but also as an effective communicative-pragmatic mechanism for organizing literary discourse, creating genre-specific tension, modelling the psychological states of characters, and implementing manipulative strategies. The following research objectives were addressed in the course of the study: analysing the evolution of scholarly approaches to the study of negation; systematising contemporary theoretical perspectives on negation; developing a semantic-pragmatic typology of negation in British psychological online thrillers; characterising the lexical, grammatical, pragmatic, and discourse means of realizing different types of negation; identifying their communicative functions, stylistic potential, and role in creating psychological tension; investigating the manipulative potential of negation and its interaction with contextual implicature, presupposition, and the narrative organization of literary texts; and outlining the potential applications of the obtained findings in linguopragmatics, pragma-stylistics, discourse analysis, literary text theory, and the teaching of the English language and literature.
