APPROXIMATION AND ITS LANGUAGE MARKERS IN ENGLISH

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Abstract. The rise of discourse and cognitive studies represents one of the mainstreams of present-day Linguistics. The research carried out by S. Colcombe (Colcombe&Wyer, 2002), A. Costa (Costa et al, 2003), R. Langacker (Langacker, 1990), D. Medin (Medin&Heit, 1999), E. Schegloff (Schegloff, 2007), and other linguists paved the way to treating discourse as representation of cognitive and communicative impact of information transfer. The topicality of our research is determined by the importance of Discourse and Cognitive Studies for treating categorization of information transfer and its further verbalization.

The objectives of the research include pointing out linguistic means of approximation and their usage in English discourse; clarification of the role of approximation markers in modification of the information perceived; singling out the functions of approximation markers in English literary and scientific discourse types.

While carrying out this research such methods of investigation were applied: methods of semantic and contextual analyses, categorization and discourse analyses as well as text interpretation.

The novelty of the investigation reveals itself in treating approximation as result of secondary categorization of the information perceived by a human being.
The research proves that approximation performs an important part in present-day English discourse. Approximation is treated as an indistinct fixation of a certain quality, degree, measure, or a trait that takes place as the result of mental operations, which have to do with categorization of properties of an object, phenomena, state or action. The usage of approximation markers in discourse indicates that the producer of utterance lacks precise understanding of nature, quality, state of the object, phenomena or actions described, or one’s desire to avoid straightforwardness of the utterance, or hide the real or specified information, to manipulate the recipient’s behavior.

Keywords: approximation, categorization, cognition, semantics, discourse

Andrei E. Levitsky

Lomonosov Moscow State University Moscow, Russia
e-mail: andrelev@list.ru ORCID iD: V-6748-2017

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