Information on the thesis

The dissertation focuses on the study of communication verbs in
modern English based on the texts from the British National Corpus
(BNC). The studies of communicative verbs have been conducted in the
following aspects: semantic and grammatical peculiarities of
communication verbs in different languages; comparative analyses of
communication verbs; studies of communication verbs in different
registers and compiling dictionaries of communication verbs.
The topicality of this paper is stipulated by the focus of modern
linguistic studies in analysing structural and systemic factors of lexical units
and by studying verbs by means of a corpus approach to establish not only
lexico-semantic, but also textual interactions of communication verbs.
The practical significance of this research lies in further development
of the conception of lexical semantics of a verb and of a structure of a
mental lexicon of communication verbs. The outcome of this study may
be applied to the development of a number of disciplines, in particular,
Lexicology (a chapter on “English Vocabulary as a System”), Theoretical
Grammar (chapters “Lexical Words”, “Major Verb Functions and
Classes”, “Clause Grammar”, “Lexical Expressions in Speech and
Writing”), courses in Lexicography (chapters “Monolingual Dictionaries”,
“Bilingual Dictionaries”, “Learner Dictionaries”), Corpus Linguistics
(chapters “Verbs”, “Verb Collocations”) and Cognitive Semantics
(chapter “Situated Embodied Semantics and Connectionist Modelling”,
“Cognitive Linguistic Applications in Second or Foreign Language
Instruction”). Also, the results can be used for internships in
Lexicography, Translation and Machine Translation.
The most typical synonymic sets of communication verbs, forty-two,
have been singled out and described in this study. The synonymy is
treated as a distinctive feature of the communication verbs: we know the
word “by the company it keeps”, i.e., the peculiarities of the use of
synonyms and in what way they differ constitute the subtleties in the
differences of their meanings. It is also true about antonyms, where fifteen
pairs of antonyms were delineated in this study.
Another paradigmatic feature of the communication verbs is
projected in the patterns in which they are used in the BNC. It specifies
the collocation and colligation of each particular verb and encompasses
twenty-five models. The following models are the most productive ones in
which the communication verbs are used in the BNC: S + V comtr + N/Pron,
S + V comtr + that-clause, S + V comtr + clause/question, S + V comtr + IO +
DO, S + V comtr + DO + (not) + to-infinitive/phrase, S + V comtr + DO +
clause/question, (DS) + S + V comtr + (DS).
The communication verbs used that appear predominantly in
academic texts are: suggest, require, describe, accept, explain, report,
argue, introduce, prove, relate, affect, indicate, express, publish, reflect
etc. The communication verbs used that appear predominantly in fiction
are: say, tell, ask, call, talk, believe, decide, speak, wish, suppose, wonder,
listen, answer, sound, imagine, order, reply, demand, worry, cry, remind,
promise etc. The communication verbs used that appear predominantly in
publicistic texts are: claim, admit, deny, charge, threaten, warn, name,
urge, accuse, appeal, ban, condemn and concede. The communication
verbs that are used predominantly in spoken discourse are: thank, reckon
and bet. The communication verbs that are equally used in all four text
types are: write, decide, agree and refuse.
Further studies may conduct a comparative research of English
communication verbs with other Germanic languages and with their
Slavic counterparts such as Ukrainian, Polish or Byelorussian.
Key words: communication verbs, speech-act verbs, classes of
communication verbs, synonyms, antonyms, pattern, cohesive element.