The paper briefly describes the method for identifying predicate-argument structures in a text and presents the results of the study of two text corpora. The study combines elements of automatic (frequency-lexical, predicate-argument, morphological) and functional-grammatical (interpretive) analysis. The text corpora examined have different temporal and genre affiliations, they are narrative texts by Dostoevsky (19th century) and monologue and dialogue texts of political YouTube discussions (20th century). We prove the idea that the personages` speech (extracts from fiction by Dostoevsky) and YouTube discussions are linguistically comparable as both belong to the functional sphere of speech acts. We consider negative, ambivalent, positive, and de-emotive types of the lexical semantics of psych verbs and propose an algorithm for calculating the semantics of psych predicates used with negation, since the scope of negation in this case is the lexical semantics of the verb, not the predication as a whole. We describe the cases when negative psych predicates lose their perfect meaning. Particularly, we consider the top-5 most frequently encountered psych verbs used with negation, some of them are common to both corpora, some are unique. The role of negative psych verbs as a means of expressing emotional unaffectedness (de-emotive meaning), as well as the role of de-emotives in speech tactics demonstrating the speaker’s intellectual superiority over the addressee are discussed. The study reveals new aspects in the grammatical semantics of psych verbs, discovers common properties and uniqueness of speech tactics in the corpora belonging to different historical epochs, also it makes it possible to uncover the mechanism of creating psychological tension depicted in Dostoevsky’s narrative texts.
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Nikitina E. N., Stankevich M. A., Larionov D. S. (2025). Psych verbs used with negation: A way of interpretation of automatic text analysis data // Media Linguistics, 12 (2), 174–198.