Description Genre Varieties: Functioning Features of Verb Predicates

The paper is devoted to the consideration of the specifics of the descriptive type of speech and the study of the features of the functioning of verb predicates in the context of the genre description paradigm. The empirical basis of the work is fiction, descriptive texts are selected from the works of Russian classics of the 19th-20th centuries. The work uses a functional-semantic approach and the method of contextual analysis. The genre description paradigm is formed by a description-landscape, a description-interior, a description-portrait and a description of a thing (displaying the external properties of an object). In all genre varieties of description, the contours of the spatial arrangement of objects are outlined: through actants and predicates, the referential space is transmitted, in addition to which the receptive space associated with pragmatic meanings and subjective navigation can be explored. The greatest variety of groups of predicates, is observed in the description-landscape. A more limited set of lexical-semantic groups of predicates is presented in the description-interior. The most limited set of groups of predicates is fixed in the description-portrait due to the limited set of elements that make up the external image of a person. Actional semantics predicates can be used in descriptive genres, acquiring the function of characterizing space, while the acting object, perceived as one of the signs of the described picture, is important.