Linguistic and Cultural Study of the Implicit Negation in Spanish

Abstract

The article considers the category of negation in Spanish as one of the most important components of its culture. Being a language universal and a fundamental category of any culture, negation realizes a great variety of communicative functions. Their study leads to a better understanding of the communicative behavior of the foreign culture representatives. The article presents different points of view on the nature of negation, by analyzing and summarizing different approaches made by different scientists all over the world to the study of this linguistic phenomenon, thus highlighting two main aspects of investigation of negation: formal (syntactical) and conceptual (communicative). When functional capacity of the category in forming negative meanings within real communicative process is studied, the importance should be given to the cognitive and pragmatic features, irrespective of the set grammar rules of negation. In this connection, the article analyzes those forms of negation which are not expressed grammatically. The author has selected and analyzed a number of speech patterns, conveying negative meanings in the process of communication and the following groups were singled out among them: affirmative exclamation, rhetorical question, ironic response. The author stresses that in spite of being manifested at all levels of the language, the implicit negation does not have any fixed marker of expression and it’s always difficult to differentiate it in the context. However, its profound study will help to understand better the communicative behavior of the foreign-language speaking participants in the dialogical interaction. The article examines the comparative aspects of the negation study at the confluence of Russian and Spanish speaking cultures, spotting the differences in the linguistic world pictures.