Alice from the Tales of L. Carroll as a Character and Linguistic Personality

Abstract

The relevance of this work is determined by the importance of studying the problem of the child’s linguistic personality as a fiction character in a linguistic-pragmatic manner, from the writer’s linguistic personality intentions and characteristics perspective, and insufficient linguistic aspect knowledge of Lewis Carroll’s works about Alice’s adventures. The work substantiates the following: as opposed to the fact that, due to ontological characteristics, individual mental, psychological and physical development and personality growth, the degree of their language acquisition and communicative skills, primary school age children are usually weak or average linguistic personalities, while fiction characters of this age are able to meet the parameters of a strong linguistic personality. It has been established that the preferred, highly appreciated by L. Carroll qualities of a seven-year-old English girl are as follows: high level of cognitive-speech development, speech-cognitive processes, vocabulary, ability to communicate, reflect, draw conclusions, evaluate and express one's opinion in words, intelligence superior to the development of an average child of this age, as well as Alice’s internal qualities, manifested in her speech activity, taking into account not only speech peculiarities, but also themes and stylistics, communicational strategies and tactics, pragmatics, perception adequacy and the interlocutor’s speech understanding, influencing the opponent with the paralinguistic methods, psycho-emotional background of communication. These qualities make it possible to characterize a given linguistic personality of a literary character as strong. A number of Alice's qualities allow her to be considered as a national-cultural English type of personality.