SYSTEMATIZATION OF HOLOPHRASTIC CONSTRUCTIONS’ PROPERTIES

Abstract

The paper is focused on studying regularities of holophrastic constructions’ functioning in the English literary prose by means of identifying and classifying the most significant features of their linguistic characteristics and expression. Holophrastic construction is regarded in the paper as a synthetically formed composite lexical unit that combines features of a word, a word-combination, or a sentence, and which figuratively but precisely represents in communication the integrative pictures of the individuals’ thinking or behavior, fixed in their memory as a corresponding concept, for decoding of which the recipients use their communicative and cognitive experience. Having analyzed the interpretations of holophrastic constructions’ characteristic features given in various scientific sources, the authors present a generalized classification of their linguistic properties as well as provide examples of their actualization in English literary texts. The carried out analysis allowed the authors to systematize English holophrastic constructions according to the following most significant features of their linguistic expression: communicative and pragmatic aim (inducing to actions, restraining form actions, and evaluation of the communicative situation), form of expressing meaning (transparent or opaque), degree of their emotional loading (emotionally neutral, emotionally coloured, and emotionally expressive constructions), their syntactic function in the sentence (subject, predicate, object, attribute, or adverbial modifier) and their structure (three-component, four-component, five-component, and poly-component, i.e. consisting of six or more components). The performed study advances the idea that the substantiated classification can serve as a methodological tool for structuring classes, subclasses and groups of the experimental material within the scope of similar linguistic research.