Grammatical Means of the Category of Alterity in English Fiction

Abstract

The content of the category of otherness determines the nature of the communicative interaction between interactors, as well as their communicative roles, strategies, tactics. A more complete disclosure of the content of the category of otherness, represented by the means of a particular language, is necessary for the development of cognitive linguistics and communicology. The problem of explication of the category of otherness by means of grammar is poorly studied and has not been subjected to a systematic linguistic description until now. The aim of the study is to identify English- and Russian-language grammatical means objectifying the category of otherness in artistic communication. In the course of the study, it was revealed that the actualization of subordinate categorical features: unity – multiplicity, identity – similarity, similarity – difference, property – alienness, normativity – non–normativity, certainty – uncertainty, reality – hypotheticism is carried out using various linguistic means, including grammatical ones. Thanks to the definition of the category of otherness, implicit meanings and latent signs of the characters' communicative behavior (verbal and nonverbal) are revealed in the literary text. The results showed that in the analyzed literary texts, the author's individual grammatical means of expressing the category of otherness set the vector of interpretation of the relationship between the characters and their inner world within the categorical features of this category. It was found that the use of the author's syntactic constructions and grammatical forms modified by the author contributes to a deeper penetration into the content of artistic works. The results obtained complement the development of the linguistic representation of communicative consciousness and the idea of the functional features of grammatical forms that explicate the categories of communication, in particular, the category of otherness.