Category of Quality in Literary and Media Discourses (on the Examples of German Verbs)

Abstract

The paper addresses the cognitive potential of relational verbs in modern German in displaying procedural changes in the qualitative characteristics of objects of real and mental reality in literary and media discourses. Relational verbs are a monogrammatic set of lexical units that conceptualize and fix procedural changes of an explicitly uncaused nature in the language picture of the world. All verbs are characterized by the seme of “process”, which means something that occurs in time, it expresses the concept of the process in the broadest sense of the word. There is a correspondence between the denotative seme of the process and the language, grammatical, categorical seme of the process. The study shows that going from the conceptual picture of the world to the language one can reveal and describe different ways of objectification of the same concept in the language, and identify differences in the interpretation of this concept. In this case, we are talking about the quality category.

Keywords

• relational verb
• quality category
• literary discourse
• function
• linguoculture