Psycholinguistic Aspect of Speech Evaluation

Tetyana Krysanova (Volyn Institute for Economics and Management, Lutsk, Ukraine)

Email: slcd@privat-online.net

 

ABSTRACT:

Evaluation as a psychological and linguistic category is characterized by its dual nature. From the one side evaluative utterances are treated as a psychological phenomenon which changes and directs the speaker's activity. From the other side the linguistic evaluation has its addressee who draws out the speaker's emotional state. The evaluation is based on the speaker's feelings and emotions with the help of which the speaker estimates the reality. The evaluative function of emotions is specified both by psychologists and linguists (Shakhovsky, Simonov, Allport, Averil).

Expression of evaluation is a signal of the speaker's emotional state, it is a direct, explicit indication on the distribution of one’s sympathies and antipathies. A person constantly expresses positive and negative attitude to the world around. Any emotion is the product of reflective evaluating mentality. The received information is estimated by the speaker and brought to the speaker's notice in the form of an emotional experience. Feeling the emotion the person associates it with a positive and negative emotion as any emotion is the form of one’s evaluation of the world. Parameters of emotions and evaluation intersect: pleasant is good, unpleasant is bad.

The emotive component of the utterance is characterized, first of all, by verbs containing evaluative sememe (about 39% of emotive lexical units of all parts of speech). They can name the corresponding feeling or emotion: to hate, to love, to like, to detest or can emotionally characterize addressee’s actions: to lye, to cheat, to disappoint. Among adjectives (about 31%) it is necessary to allocate lexical units realizing any deviation from the norm aside of negative or positive evaluation: lazy, tactless, brutish, witty and naming speaker’s feeling or emotion: contemptible, lovely, unpleasant. We can distinguish a group of affective adjectives in the semantics of which evaluation is combined with intensification and the emotive component acts on the foreground: frightful, awful. Nouns (about 23%) are represented by common and proper nouns containing in their structure a positive or negative evaluative sememe: sneak, brute, bore. Among these nouns we can distinguish a group of zoonyms (names of birds, animals, insects) the connotative meaning of which is formed on the associative basis: pig, peacock, dog. Evaluative adverbs (about 5%) qualify addressee’s actions and states, pointing out the emotive component: cowardly, nicely.

Thus, emotions and evaluation take synchronous part in the acts of reflection and cognition.