Abstract
This article is focuses on the cases of alexithymia, which are analyzed for the purpose of revealing their pragmatic capacity in fiction literature. Alexithymia is viewed from the perspective of linguistics, and is defined as the difficulty or inability to verbally express emotions verbally. Emotions, in turn, are considered as social phenomenon that manifests in the communicative situation. The goal consists in examination of emotions in a new perspective. Research methodology is comprised of definitional, semantic, and pragmatic analysis of emotional and evaluative utterances that reflect and implicate alexithymia, selected by the method of continuous sampling from the English-language literary texts. For the first time, alexithymia is viewed not as mental deviation or disorder, but as a linguistic attempt of the author to exert and increase pragmatic effect on the audience by explication or implication of the additional, hidden information and emotional evaluative meanings. The conclusion is made that inability to convey emotional state linguistically is often used an implication technique in fiction literature. Emotions, however, can be detected despite their linguistic inexpressiveness. In the course of this research, the author determines that namely context helps to understand the emotion, its intensity, polarity, and pragmatic capacity.
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