Colouratives in the English-Language Literary Text: Correlation of Direct and Indirect Meanings

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the correlation of direct and indirect meanings of colouratives that are used in the English-language literary text based on the material of women’s prose, in particular, the novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) by M. Atwood. As part of the analysis of theoretical and methodological material, it has been revealed that colouratives in a literary text contribute to the fact that the author of a literary text can implicitly convey to the reader a much larger amount of information: such words can evoke certain associations in the recipient, allow the author to attract his attention, create a visual, pictorial artistic reality that differs in one or another set of colours. During the analysis of the selected contexts (more than 500 fragments) with colouratives (516 units) from the literary work – a dystopian novel by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood “The Handmaid’s Tale”, a number of features have been identified. In the analyzed literary work, various colours have been used – ten frequently occurring and five less common ones. As part of the work with empirical material, the frequently occurring colouratives that do not have a transfer of meaning and less frequently used secondary colouratives with a transfer of meaning (metaphor and metonymy) have been identified. Some of the colour designations have had only a direct meaning. The colouratives white, red and black are very frequently used (almost a third of them has a semantic transfer). The colouratives blue (half of them has a transfer of semantics), pink (the fourth part is metaphorical or metonymic), green and gray (half of them with a transfer of semantics) and brown (one fifth has a semantic transfer) are quite often used. Besides, the author highlights the colouratives gold(en) (with a predominance of metaphors and metonymies) and silver (half of them with a transfer of semantics), which often denote not only the colour, but also the material from which this or that object is made. The least represented are the colouratives purple, yellow, orange, peach and ivory, which are completely or almost completely not characterized by any semantic transfers. In terms of structure, one-component colouratives prevail in relation to most colours and in both groups of colouratives, however, two-component structures are also quite frequent in case of direct nomination. The indirect meaning assumes various syntactic and morphological-syntactic models of the formation of colouratives (word composition, word composition + suffixation), including figurative comparisons with the elements as and like. As a result of the study of direct and figurative meanings of colouratives in M. Atwood’s novel «The Handmaid’s Tale» we come to the conclusion about the diversity of colouratives in terms of semantic transfers (metaphor, metonymy, metaphtonymy), structure and derivational models (from simple, single-component colouratives to complex multicomponent formations).