THE WORD НАОБОРОТ (VICE VERSA) IN CONTEXTS OF DIFFERENT TYPES

Abstract

The paper for the first time studies the functions of the Russian word “наоборот”, especially in two different types of contexts. This word conveys opposite relations, which can takes up a position between two sentences and two periods. The paper’s linguistic data is from the National corpus of the Russian language. The paper demonstrates that in such position, the word “наоборот” indicates that the speaker denies a certain phenomenon conveyed in the previous text, and asserts another phenomenon, which is a directly opposite phenomenon. It is proved, in this paper, the word “наоборот” in such particular position either emphasizes the function of negation, or performs the function of substitution in conjunction with the expression indicating the negative meaning.