Linguistic Representation of Emotional and Evaluative Overtones in English Literary Discourse

The article focuses on studying the notion of overtone, suggesting detailed research of its application in different disciplines, including linguistics. Mainly, the author investigates emotional and evaluative overtones, defining them as hidden inherent meaningful components of the semantic word structure revealed in situations of the deterministic context. Research methods include a definition analysis of linguistic means of representing emotions selected by the continuous sampling method from English fiction and contextual and cognitive interpretation methods. The novelty of the article lies in the fact that emotions are examined as part of a broader scenario, where they combine and interact. Approaching emotions as a complex and diverse ensemble, the author constructs and studies lexico-semantic fields with words that express them in the English language, allowing for the analysis of emotional and evaluative overtones discovered in the overlap process of these fields. In turn, the overlap occurs due to the ability of a linguistic unit expressing emotion to move within its lexico-semantic field or to the lexico-semantic field of a different linguistic unit. An in-depth analysis has allowed for a more profound comprehension of how emotions emerge and affect each other. Moreover, English fiction has been confirmed to be a valuable source of the expression and implication of emotional states, and the context has proven to help create and reveal emotional and evaluative overtones. The analysis has also shown that the experience of emotions heavily relies on appraisal and, consequently, is subjective and depends on an individual’s world perception.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.