The Pragmatic Effect of Partial Enantiosemy in a Comic Context

Abstract

This article analyses the mechanism of development of evaluative enantionyms in a comic context. The study aims to describe the pragmatic effect created by enantionyms and identify the reasons behind it. The empirical material was selected from the works of the following modern writers: S. Dovlatov, A. Snegirev, and E. Popov. The author of this paper observed the transformations of lexical units in the conditions of a language-game and subsequently analysed the obtained data. The following was established: as a result of the occasional use of lexemes and the development of partial enantiosemy within them, the core of the unit of language-game (a type of dicteme) gets marked. This pragmatic focus leads to connotative recoding, which is based on shifting the object of evaluation and/or on the functioning of several evaluation subjects that differ in their point of view on a situation. The most active in this process are lexemes that have a high level of semantic abstraction and a fairly wide combinability and present most general evaluations of objects and phenomena of reality that occupy extreme positions on the axiological scale. This paradigmatic phenomenon is less frequently observed in words that have more concrete meanings and are somewhat limited in terms of their lexical and/or semantic valence. Thus, under abnormal contextual conditions, enantionyms that developed in the course of the abovementioned processes become markers of the core of a language-game unit and take on the qualities of a pragmeme. Thematically, units of a language-game are quite diverse; however, their most frequent axiological characteristic is as follows: the utilitarian values and evaluations of an individual collide with those generally accepted and declared by large groups of people (the state, professional community or other environment).