Pragmatic Potential of the Pronoun It in Texts of Horror Discourse.

Abstrakt

Horror discourse is presented by artistic texts which reveal a specific imaginary world that bases on the communicants’ psychological experience. The key stone of “author – reader” communication in these texts is the communicative sense of fear that finds its step by step realization on different textual and linguistic levels. Subjectivity of text creation and text perception in this communication gives birth to various implicit communicative senses that constitute the final sense of fear. One of the bearers of such implicit communicative senses in the English language is pronoun it. In some texts of the horror discourse it is used to refer to the subject-source of fear to exemplify nonidentifying reference. The conventional senses of it (“inanimate”, “dead”, and “non-human”) are exploited regularly and acquire new, specific only for horrific texts, shades of meaning: thus, we distinguish a combination of communicative senses “fear – doubt” that is possible to elicit due to the lingual expression of the SS by it bearing along with conventional senses new ones – non-identifiability, eternity and undeath.