Grammatical Means of Expressing Emotions in English Discourse

Peculiarities of expressing emotions in different languages and cultures are nowadays of great interest among researchers. However, traditionally, more attention is paid to lexis, phraseology, prosody, and nonverbal signs of communication and grammatical means are ignored. Nevertherless, they also possess significant emotive potential. The goal of this article is to systematize some facts showing that grammar can implicitly convey various emotions of the speaker and impact the hearer, as well as to draw attention of language teachers and translators to this phenomenon. I will mainly focus on modal verbs and expressions, nontraditional use of tenses, nontraditional use of some adverbs, inverse word order and some other cases summing up the earlier described facts (Ozyumenko 2005-2006, 2007) and supplementing them with new observations. The article emphasizes that discovering emotive implicature, i.e. implicit emotive intention of the speaker, and revealing its meaning is sine qua non for successful intercultural communication and equivalent translation. The data for the research were taken from English language text books, grammar books, dictionaries and fiction. The study implements contextual, definitive, pragmatic, discourse and contrastive analyses.

emotions, emotive implicature, grammar, English language