IS UNDERSTATEMENT A CONCEPT OR A CATEGORY?

Abstract

The aim of the study is to define the British phenomenon “understatement”. The relevance of this research is due to the desire to better understand the English character, which still remains a mystery to representatives of other cultures due to a special historically established, indirect, veiled, and sometimes ambiguous tradition of communication. Understatement directly serves to create this ambiguity, causing enormous difficulties in communicating both foreigners with the British and the British themselves among themselves. The main methods of research are: descriptive and structural methods, component and definitional analysis. The results of the study showed that understatement represents a nationally specific communicative category which contains the attitudes and rules of speech behavior of the British and participates in the regulation of the communicative process. Understatement has a certain structure and includes verbal and non-verbal means of expressing communicative content aimed at harmonious, conflict-free communication. The theoretical significance lies in a clear definition of the British phenomenon “understatement”, in identifying its speech strategies, linguistic and extralinguistic ways of expression. The practical significance is expressed in using the results of the research in lecture courses of the theory of intercultural communication, stylistics and general linguistics.