Lexical combinations of contemporary British military fiction: lexical-semantic and stylistic features

Abstract

This article focuses on the lexical-semantic features of the language means of contemporary British military fiction. Despite the sustained philological attention to fictional texts of different genres, the relative disregard of the lexical patterning in fiction on military themes stands in need of scrutiny. In order to account for all the lingual and extralingual factors influencing the process of fictional text composition, this article takes a philological approach and conducts an integrated analysis – combining linguistic and literary-theoretical perspectives – of the lexical patterning of contemporary military fiction. Our aim is to establish the main lexical-semantic and stylistic peculiarities of the dominant lexical combinations in contemporary British fiction with macro-, meso- and micro-inclusions of military themes. Functions of the thematic lexicon connected with the war topic are more obvious in the literary texts with macro- and meso-inclusions of military themes. However, their role in the texts with micro-inclusions of military themes is quite significant as well: the details of the military environment and phenomena serve as a means of establishing a close connection between the reader and the storyworld; recollections of the war period echo in the plot line of the characters, reflecting its destructive consequences even long afterwards.