Emotive function of the language

Abstract

Emotions are one of the motivating factors of the human mental activity. They are in the focus of different sciences, directions and disciplines, such as pedagogy, linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, theory of communication, theory of speech acts, psychology, sociology, anthropology and medicine. In the language emotions are represented with a wide range of their names, characteristics and shades. It is difficult to overestimate the role of feelings in the people’s relationships. The aim of the proposed article is the investigation of the emotive function in the language. Emotions are the specific form of the representation and understanding of reality, as, while showing emotions, the person becomes both the object and the subject of the cognition. They implement some specific person’s motives, influence the addressee and, at the same time, are interpreted by him. The phenomenon “emotivity” has a great amount of definitions. Each of them represents this category from its side, depending on the science, in the field of which the investigation was held. It is important to distinguish two main, from our point of view, approaches to the distinguishing of emotivity: linguistic and psychological ones. That means the understanding of emotivity as of quality which is peculiar to the language and to the living subject. Linguistic works of the recent decade define the emotivity as the physiological and psychological state of a person, i.e. separating it with the notion of emotivity. It is considered that the verbal description of emotions transforms the emotionality (that is entirely psychological process) into the emotivity (which is the language phenomenon), that shows emotional characteristics of the language personality and gives possibility to perform emotional communication. The term “emotivity” is used together with the term “emotionality” and, in its turn, has different descriptions. Emotionality is described as the psychological characteristic of the personality, the state of development of its emotional sphere. And emotionality is defined as the linguistic characteristic of the word, sentence, which can cause the emotiogenic effect, trigger suitable emotions. Emotiology, which is traditionally understood as the cognitive theory of emotions, studies the cognitive psychology and linguistics. The interdisciplinary knowledge about an expression of emotions is used while studying of one or the other questions. The verbal expression of emotions is one of the main functions of the human speech. Emotional phenomena make the basis of emotional states and emotional relations of different intensity and form the sphere of person’s emotionality. As a psychological category emotionality characterizes the content, the quality and the dynamic of person’s emotions. While transforming into the linguistic category of emotiveness in the text, emotionality can become the subject and the ways of the representation of reality.