DISCOURSIVE PECULIARITIES OF ENGLISH HOROSCOPES

Abstract

The article is devoted to the discoursive (compositional, lexical and pragmatic) features of English horoscopes as a kind of astrological discourse. The material of the study was a corpus of texts presented on the Internet. The total sample volume is 50 horoscopes. Compositional, pragmatic and stylistic features of horoscopes were considered as a subject of research. Astrological discourse is an integral part of the modern media space. Its growing popularity determines the relevance of such studies aimed at identifying the features of this type of discourse. The term "discourse" is understood as the communication of people from the standpoint of their belonging to a particular social group or in relation to a typical speech situation. There is now a great variety of texts that have an astrological character in the cultural English-speaking space. A significant proportion of them are texts containing various horoscopes. Study of the typology of horoscope texts in English, their structural, pragmatic, etc. characteristics, obviously, is an important stage in the study of astrological discourse in general. The main function of the horoscope is prediction (description of the future). A typical astrological horoscope, placed in the media space, declares knowledge about the influence of celestial bodies on the fate of people and their earthly events, according to which they can be predicted by the relative position of celestial bodies. The main characteristics of horoscopes are their lexical content, compositional structure and pragmatics. The study of the linguistic features of astrological predictions allowed us to identify the main functions performed by horoscopes in the media space: informative, appealing, persuasive and emotional. A horoscope is a polycode text that contains verbal and nonverbal signs. The latter include iconic signs and typesetting means. We see the prospect of further research in the study of the linguistic features of other genres of English astrological discourse.