Principles of Psycholinguistic Text Analysis and the Theory of Emotions

Abstract

Considering a number of postulates of Russian Psycholinguistics, the author presents the psycholinguistic foundations for understanding emotions in the subject's verbal and cogitative activity and proposes to reconstruct the process of understanding emotions with an analysis of the nature of predication in speech actions. The content of the text arises in the speech-cogitative activity of the subject, who has certain structures of consciousness and changes them in the process of this activity. Emotions essentially determine the meaning generation and perform a regulatory function in the text understanding: a) the motivational sphere of speech activity includes emotions as a subjective form of existence of a motive and largely determines the nature of speech action; b) based on the speech action carried out in signs, the recipient extracts from it a personal meaning, including an emotional one; c) the emotional component of the motive can gradually shift the connotations of meanings and change the associative links of the individual; d) the main purpose of the emotional component of the motive is to highlight the semantic dominant of the text. Speech action actualizes the consciousness of the individual in speech operations, which are regarded as the procedures of handling the signs that stabilize the structures of the author's consciousness, since the subject is socially forced to exist in systems of heterogeneous signs. In the speech action, the unity of the activity of the individual, as well as its conditions, goals and means, is manifested.