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This paper presents an inquiry into the cognitive-pragmatic specifics of To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing. Its major goal is to investigate the cognitive means that enable the fulfilment of the writer’s pragmatic aims in the process of literary communication. The research reveals the writer’s aims of raising the problem of women in a patriarchal society and of intensifying manipulative influence upon the reader, which were achieved via the implicit concept of NEUROSIS and the CONTAINER concept used to metaphorically interpret the described events. The investigation proved that the concept of NEUROSIS intensifies psychological manipulation of the reader, ensuring the reader’s engagement in message creation, preserving the reader’s trust regardless of the transference of inaccurate information, etc. It participates in the reader’s neural simulation through nomination of somatisms, retrieval of memories from previous painful experiences, the activation of the “mirroring” phenomenon, etc. Metaphoric modelling provides a psychological manipulation of the reader’s perception through shading and highlighting of the appropriate facets, creating proper associations and establishing specific images. It implements activation of the neural activity, creating imaginative simulation of the reader’s body in action and involving personal cognitive experiences.

The paper is a study of the prosodic features involved in the oral actualisation of English proverbs as influenced by structural, emotional and pragmatic factors, which are defined within the framework of a new energetic approach to the research of phonetic phenomena. On the basis of auditory and acoustic analyses of English proverbs, the authors describe the energetic specificity of their prosodic organisation. This description introduces energy-grams formed with the use of a quantitative K-criterion of the texts’ emotional and pragmatic potentials, as well as their typical intonation patterns. Using the traditional method of linguistic interpretation of the results obtained, the authors substantiate invariant and variant intonation patterns of English proverbs, whose parameters are described both within the text’s structural elements and at their junctures. The authors come to the conclusion that an energetic approach to the study of a complex interaction of emotional, pragmatic, semantic and structural factors makes it possible to present a comprehensive description of invariant and variant prosodic patterns for any type of texts on the basis of such fundamental linguistic categories as emotion, pragmatics, structure, and meaning.

In the paper on the basis of a systemic analysis of the English fairy tales’ semantic, functional and structural characteristics the author updates its definition of a small form folk text, outlines typical genre characteristics and substantiates a hierarchical subordination of its functional features. The paper also advances the algorithmic model, representing the steps of unfolding the English fairy tales’ plot elements, which serves as a theoretical and methodological ground for the experimental phonetic study of prosodic means that organise the text of a fairy tale. Within the process of model formation, the author performs a matrix analysis of the fairy tale’s content and compositional structure, presented as a systemic algorithmic scheme. The evaluation of emotional and pragmatic potentials of the spoken fairy tale made it possible to describe the peculiarities of prosodic features functioning within its structural elements (exposition → development of the events → climax → denouement) and at their junctures as well as substantiate its invariant and variant intonation patterns. The carried out auditory analysis proves that there is a direct correlation between the fairy tale’s plot structure and its prosodic means, whose specific interaction triggers creative and cognitive processes in the recipient’s mind aimed at conveying the text pragmatic aim.