LEXICAL INTENSIFIERS AND SYNTACTIC HOMONYMY IN FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY’S LANGUAGE: A STUDY OF PERSONAL LETTERS

The paper deals with some cases of syntactic homonymy in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s personal letters. The syntactic homonymy poses a problem for automatic text processing (machine translation, etc.), unlike speakers, who are sufficiently immersed in the speech and situational context and are not abstracted from the meaning, the programme cannot always interpret syntactic structures in the right way so that the possibility of different understanding does not even appear. However, the specifics of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s syntax make even a human reader face the a problem of syntactic homonymy. At the same time the specificity of the semantics and speech function of intensifiers, the expressive function, speaker’s emotions that intensifiers express and the uncertainty of real differences in the degree that intensifi ers denote, in most cases result in syntactic ambiguity remaining unnoticed. When syntactic homonymy is removed at the semantic level, it does not considerably affect the understanding of the sentence and the text. The article gives examples of different types of syntactic homonymy in constructions with intensifiers, describes some conditions of homonymy occurrence and some conditions under which it does not occur.