Archaisms in the Early New English play by D. Lindsay "The Satire of the Three Estates": the problem of identification and stylistic evaluation

Abstract

The subject of the research is the method of identification and the problem of stylistic interpretation of archaic vocabulary in literary texts of the early New England period and specifically in the play by D. Lindsay "Satire of the Three Estates". The article discusses the potential of using the data of the diachronic corpus and corpus dictionaries to detect archaic elements in the works of art of the XVI century. Based on the comments of authoritative philologists of the Early New England period and modern research, the trends of the actual perception of the introduction of archaisms into the literary text by the authors of this time are considered. The article proposes an algorithm for identifying obsolete units in artistic material created in Scottish (taking into account the archaic nature of this dialect), based on a comparison of approximate indicators of the frequency of reproduction of an element in the Early New English and Scottish sections of the Helsinki Corpus, as well as data from corpus dictionaries of Middle English and Scottish. For the stylistic evaluation of archaisms in Lindsay's play, the method of linguistic-stylistic analysis is used, in which the linguistic element is considered from the point of view of contextual conditions. The scientific novelty of the work is due to the fact that in order to solve the problem of analyzing archaisms in the text of the Early New English period, an algorithm is being developed to clarify whether the unit was obsolete at a particular moment in the development of English. It was found that the predominant proportion of words in Lindsay's play was not archaic within the Scottish dialect and only a few of the units involved were already obsolete at the time of the creation of the text in standard Early English. The archaisms found in the play function in fragments of high style, which allows us to state that Lindsay belonged to the authors for whom archaisms were part of the sublime vocabulary. The practical value of the work is determined by the ability to apply the proposed algorithm for detecting archaisms for the stylistic analysis of any Early New English literary text, as well as to carry out a stylistic assessment of archaisms from the point of view of the identified trends in their perception by the authors of the XVI century.