INDICATORS OF THE SEMANTIC CATEGORY OF MIRATIVITY IN THE RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES

Abstract. In the process of communication the speaker can give new information that may or may not meet the expectations of the listener, who, in turn, becomes the speaker and utters a response. The language implementation of the new information that does not meet the speaker’s expectations is usually described in the scientific literature as mirativity. Mirativity describes the speaker’s surprise or suddenness of an action or event. We can assume that mirativity is a linguistic universal: in all languages there are constructions that the speaker uses to describe states, actions, and events that do not correspond to his current mental state.

The subject of the research is a comparative study of the indicators of mirativity in the Russian and English languages and their structural and semantic features.
The purpose of the research is to analyze and compare the indicators of mirativity in Russian and English, classify these indicators for their correct use in translation.

The paper uses the method of pairwise selection of lexical units, as well as the method of comparative analysis of language units.
The study compared some indicators of mirativity in the Russian and English languages and found a number of additional parameters that need to be taken into account for the most complete characterization of mirativity indicators in dictionary entries. One of these parameters is the characteristic of the action described in the proposition according to the degree of controllability. This parameter is particularly found in constructions with the verb “взять”. Thus, the appearance of the value of the controllability of an action is influenced by the mood and tense of the verb, as well as the conjunctions- particles with which the verb “взять” is combined in the appropriate form.

In the course of comparing grammatical indicators of mirativity in Russian and English, it was found that in English, the Conjunctive Mood serves the sphere of expression of evaluative meanings and can be used to formalize mirative meanings.

To sum up, analyzing the indicators of productivity and identifying additional parameters can significantly improve the quality of translation of texts from Russian to English and vice versa.

Keywords: modality, mirativity, surprise, category