The preventive in the horoscope text

Abstract

   The article studies the specifics of the semantics and structure of the preventive in the horoscope text, which is built according to the rules characteristic of any text. The horoscope possesses completeness, coherence, integrity, logic, etc., while it can have texts of different length: from two to three sentences to the full text including from 5 to 30 sentences. Volumetric horoscopes, as a rule, contain predictions for a year or a month, small horoscopes specialize in predictions for one day.

   The purpose of our work is to identify the specifics of representing the meaning of warning in television discourse.

   By making the syntactic level the focus of our attention, we clarify the definition of a warning as a special type of pragmatic expression of will. The article identifies the preventive model in television discourse. For this model, the concessive-contrastive semantics is relevant, which functions most often as implicit in various contexts. We describe the keywords, nominating the preventive in the horoscope, and the conditions for semantic substitutions of keywords. The main method of research is a discourse analysis of more than 1000 horoscopic texts functioning in the program “Good Morning” (TV I). The results of an anonymous survey of more than 2,000 people indicate that about 50 percent of respondents believe horoscopes.