This article examines the linguistic representation of the crime phenomenon in criminal literary discourse through a cognitive and discourse-based framework. The study was motivated by the view that crime fiction is not merely a popular literary genre, but a complex communicative system in which language organizes suspense, suspicion, interpretation, and explanatory closure. Although crime fiction has been widely studied from historical and narrative perspectives, less attention has been given to the linguistic mechanisms through which crime itself is verbalized and cognitively processed. Therefore, the main aim of the study was to identify how crime is constructed through lexical-semantic, pragmatic, and narrative strategies, as well as how readers are guided toward interpretation under conditions of uncertainty.

To achieve this aim, the study focused on five objectives: (1) to determine linguistic forms of crime representation; (2) to identify lexical-semantic resources related to criminality; (3) to analyze pragmatic strategies of concealment and suspicion; (4) to examine cognitive mechanisms of reader inference; and (5) to describe discourse procedures through which hidden events are reconstructed. Methodologically, the research employed a qualitative descriptive-analytical design integrating discourse analysis, lexical semantics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and narratology.

The findings demonstrate that crime in literary discourse is represented through both direct and indirect linguistic means. Direct forms include lexical units such as murder, theft, suspect, and evidence, while indirect forms rely on fear, secrecy, contradiction, silence, and abnormal behavior. The results also reveal stable lexical-semantic fields including violence, investigation, suspicion, motive, concealment, and judgment. Pragmatic analysis showed that hesitation, evasion, over-explanation, and strategic silence frequently function as markers of hidden guilt. Furthermore, readers are cognitively positioned as co-investigators who construct and revise hypotheses while interpreting fragmented events.

In conclusion, criminal literary discourse should be understood as a language-based system that transforms concealed actions into meaningful narrative reality. The study contributes to literary discourse research by offering an integrated semantic, pragmatic, cognitive, and narratological model for the analysis of crime fiction.