Linguocognitive Analysis of Convergent Space of the Threat Construct

The article is devoted to the communicative construct of threat as a cognitive tool, basis or method of interpretation helping a speaker to evaluate threat statements which are capable form different effects on interlocutors’ emotional state and form their feelings of certain intensity. The communicative threat construct makes it possible to determine the limological parameters of the semantic space of verbal threat in the context of interlocutors’ social interaction and fix in this space the meaningful elements that form the idea of verbal threat in cognitive agents’ mental space.The study shows that the communicative construct of threat includes a number of statements in a form of language social practices realized in the process of discursive interaction and associated with a change of addressee’s emotional state in the content continuum from disposition “comfortable state” to disposition “uncomfortable state”. The set of speaker’s and listener’s possible dispositions of the emotional state forms the functional and semantic space of verbal threat making it possible to assert that almost any utterance with the meaning of threat is one of the I-speaker’s and I-listener’s possible dispositions on the content continuum of menasive construct, while a menasive construct is a set of I-speaker’s and I-listener’s possible dispositions of emotional states. The use of a communicative construct of threat opens up possibilities for interpreting the effect ofthreats, and the results of this study can be used to predict the pragmatic effect of threats on a single or mass addressee. Considering of verbal manifestations of threat as a communicative construct makes it possible to evaluate not only the intense depth of the pragmatic effect of threats in social interaction, but also to interpret the directions of this effect within the framework of a typical threat scenario.