PARTS OF SPEECH IN PAIN DESCRIPTORS FOR RUSSIAN-LANGUAGE PATIENTS WITH ALEXITHYMIA
The article describes how pain descriptors, belonging to different parts of speech, influence the success of their perception by individuals with a high level of alexithymia. From the standpoint of linguistic personology, the main characteristics of a linguistic personality are determined by the speech frequency of lexical units related to different lexical and grammatical classes. Thus, parts of speech act as one of the parameters showing the way of a person’s thinking and this parameter has not been thoroughly studied in patients with alexithymia. The research involved several linguistic experiments, aimed at revealing the characteristics of pain description by individuals with a high level of alexithymia. The results show that patients with alexithymia more successfully perceive descriptors expressed by verbs, less successfully - descriptors expressed by participles, adjectives and the grammar category of state, which is explained by the specificity of their cognitive characteristics. Verbs are more effective pain descriptors due to the fact that they exclude some antonymical meanings, which are present in the semantics of descriptors, expressed by participles and adjectives. The study revealed units that should not be used in pain questionnaires adapted for patients with alexithymia. The data obtained helped to reveal linguistic factors that influence positively and negatively the understanding of the units used in pain questionnaires, and, consequently, the success of pain verbalization.