Overstatement in Communicative Demonstrativeness: Pragmatic and Linguistic Aspects

Abstract

Overstatement plays the leading role organizing the phenomenon of communicative demonstrativeness by highlighting and translating meaningful information about the producer of the utterance. The purpose of the study is to identify and describe the properties and means of overstatement actualization. An interdisciplinary approach and the method of psycholinguistic analysis of the communicants’ speech output are used. The material for the analysis was the statements of the participants from the 2013-2022 television interviews. It is established that at present overstatement, the property of communicative demonstrativeness, is widely used as a means of the speakers’ attractive verbal behavior, caused by the need to obtain recognition of the personality identity that the speech producer presents from other people and its consolidation in the consciousness of the recipients. It is emphasized that the semantic basis of overstatement is the expression of the worldview possessed by a manipulative linguistic personality. Demonstrative overstatement, used to highlight a significant message, may have involuntary, intentional and periodic types and perform expressive, conative, aesthetic, pragmatic, denotative and contact functions. The study shows that overstatement in communicative demonstrativeness is realized in speech strategies of bragging, dramatization, false complaint, compliment, praise, condemnation, and humiliation as a way of self-promotion, over-evaluation and double over-evaluation, consisting of the adverb «absolutely» and an adjective. The linguistic means of actualization of overstatement are revealed: hyperbole, hyperbolic form of tropes (metaphors, epithets, comparisons), phraseological units, superlative adjectives, emotionally marked verbs, semantic and grammatical superlatives conveying the maximum degree of quality, intensifiers «very», «quite», exclamation sentences, shortened quotations, modified sayings and imperative suggestions. The results obtained can be used in the course of semiotics and psycholinguistics.

Keywords

• overstatement
• communicative demonstrativeness
• self-presentation
• hyperbole
• double over-evaluation
• discourse
• linguistic personality