NEGATIVE EVALUATION IN THE SENTENCES WITH THE SPATIAL MARKERS OF “ONE’S OWN” SPACE IN THE ENGLISH BIBLE TEXT: LEXICO-SEMANTIC, SYNTACTIC AND COMMUNICATIVE-PRAGMATIC APPROACHES

Abstract

The research sets out to investigate spatial deixis in the English Biblе text. Special attention is given to “one’s own” space manifested by the pronouns this/these and the adverb here. We focus on lexicо-semantic, syntactic and communicative-pragmatic peculiarities of evaluative sentences with the spatial deictic markers outlining the boundaries of “one’s own” space.
The analysis of the semantic features of this phenomenon leads to the conclusion that for the speaker the most important is the correlation of “one’s own” space with a negative person, third person in particular, and with a negative event, concept or state of affairs. In such a way “one’s own” space is evaluated indirectly through its connection with negatively evaluated people or concepts that have direct evaluation.
Composite sentences and complex sentences with objective clauses and adverbial clauses of cause prevail in the text. The speaker wants to provide additional information about the object of negative evaluation and explain its causes.
The communicative-pragmatic analysis of sentences used to verbalize negative evaluation of “one’s own” space displays the dominant use of representative speech acts. The purpose of the speaker is to express negative position to the object of evaluation and to persuade the addressee to change his attitude towards certain people or things.
The quantitative analysis proves that spatial markers of “one’s own” space in the English Bible text are more likely to acquire negative evaluation (63,6%).