Negative Deverbatives in the Texts of the Law: Communicative and Pragmatic Aspect

Abstract

The article concentrates on the study of the peculiarities of the functioning of negative verbal nouns (deverbatives) in legislative texts. In the process of analyzing the current laws of the Russian Federation, it was found that the negative deverbatives used in them have different degrees of substantivisation, and the most common are lexemes ending in -ение, that is, exactly those in which the verbal semantics of the base is clearly manifested. On the contrary, the more strongly a word has been substantivized, the less opportunities it has to attach negation. Weakly substantivized nouns are quite difficult for the recipient to perceive, since they are the result of nominalization of the original predicate, during which the particle does not merge with the base and turns into a prefix, thereby forming a word that is more complex in terms of structure and semantics. In addition, acquiring formal indicators of belonging to a group of nouns, the lexeme continues to express verb meanings that can be actualized in certain contexts. In this paper, three types of contexts are distinguished that actualize the verbal semantics of the deverbative: 1) use in constructions with derived denominal causal or conditional prepositions; 2) the presence of a negative deverbative noun in the creative case with the meaning of the actor; 3) use in constructions with propositional actants. The functioning of the deverbative in the above-mentioned contexts often leads to a contradiction of their substantive and verbal meanings.