2.5. Tonality Analysis The category of tonality corresponds to the emotive charge of the text.
The emotions as a psychological phenomenon are generally based on
the philosophic category of evaluation – that is, on perceiving something
as positive and negative. That is why the tonality of the text can be
generally described as positive or negative (or both, if there is some
ambivalent perception).
The emotive charge of any text is expressed via its expressive means:
numerous stylistic devices (tropes and figures), composition changes etc.
Generally any word, any element of a text can provide its emotive charge.
This feature makes it difficult to analyse the category of tonality.
However, it would be a mistake to refer every word to the field of this
category. There are more or less stable lexical units which constitute its nucleus,
closest and farthest periphery. According to Prof. L. G. Babenko, these are:
– categorical emotives (words whose main categorical seme is an
emotion:
joy ,
sadness ,
jealous ,
grief ,
languish ,
yearn ,
miss ,
grieve etc.);
– differential emotives (words with an emotive differential seme:
idiot ,
clever ,
great ,
congratulations etc.);
– connotational emotives (words of an emotive or evaluative connotation:
death ,
war , very often expressed by the diminutive suffixes:
granny ,
tellie = TV,
popsy ,
daddio etc.)
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.
These types may combine, as in
sweetie or
heartie , where both
differential and connotational emotive is presented.
The sub-nuclear zone of the field of tonality can be probably referred
to the interjections (
ah ,
wow ,
mmmmm etc.) – words of non-separable
semantics, which can hardly be said to have any emotive seme, but
nevertheless express certain emotion.
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Exercise 49. On the basis of the text above, draw the field structure
of tonality based on its language resources. Show the nucleus, the sub-
nuclear zone, the closest and the farthest peripheries.