Constructions of Causation of the Emotion of Fear in the Buryat Language

The article examines constructions that express the causation of the emotion of fear in the Buryat language. A comprehensive, multifaceted study of ways to express functional and semantic categories, such as causativity, is one of the pressing issues in modern linguistics. The object of study is causative emotive constructions that demonstrate the interaction between the categories of causativity and emotiveness. The current anthropocentric approach to language study has led to increased interest in the category of emotiveness in linguistics. Fear, the emotion under consideration, is one of the basic negative emotions. The purpose of this work is to identify the semantic and structural components of constructions expressing the causation of fear in the Buryat language. The novelty of this work lies in the fact that, for the first time in the Buryat language, an attempt is made to determine the basic components of constructions expressing the causation of the emotion of fear. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study includes works by both domestic and foreign linguists (V. Shakhovsky, A. Vezhbitskaya, G. Lakoff, K. Izard, N. Kirillova, E. Sundueva, and others). The study material consists of a continuous sample of causative constructions from the Corpus of the Buryat Language (Buryat Corpus). As a result, it was shown that the Buryat language has several synonymous morphological causatives to denote the causation of the emotion of fear. The basic emotive verb naming the causation of fear is aylga-kha ‘to scare’. In the meanings of synonyms of the basic verb, certain prototypical features characteristic of the emotion of fear are actualized: intensity, duration of the causation of the emotion, or its external manifestations. It was found that, when designating the stimulus of the emotion of fear, object stimuli and adverbial participial constructions are used, which describe in detail the cause of the emotion. Emotive intensifiers in fear causation constructions were identified. Thus, in the Buryat language, high intensity of emotion causation is represented in combinations of adverbial participial forms with morphological causatives, whose component composition includes words with synonymous roots meaning “to frighten.” Phraseological combinations expressing the strongest degree of manifestation of the emotion of fearhorror also serve as emotive intensifiers. One notable means of emotive intensification of fear causation in the Buryat language is the use of paired causative verbs.

causativity, emotivity, causative construction, emotive construction, causative verb, emotional impact, negative emotions, fear, intensifiers, Buryat language