Lexical stylistic features of Mo Yan’s literary texts (based on the short stories “Genius” and “Set free”)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of lexical and stylistic means of creating portraits of heroes and objects in the short stories of the Chinese writer Mo Yan. The necessity of deepening the general linguistic theory about lexical stylistics and the wide usage of lexicalstylistic means in Mo Yan’s works, as well as the lack of research on this topic determine the relevance of our research. The aim of the work is to highlight and analyze in detail all the lexical and stylistic tools used by Mo Yan in his novels to describe the emotions, character traits and appearance of the characters and to paint a portrait landscape of nature and the environment. The article examines the main aspects of lexical stylistics, which is stylistic means in combination with the contextual meanings of words, especially their coloring, expressiveness, emotionality and signs of unmarkedness. The analysis of lexical and stylistic units was carried out on the basis of Mo Yan’s stories 天才 «Genius”, 放呀 “Set Free”. In parallel with the illustrative material, the own translation of both novels is suggested. By using special theoretical and linguistic methods in this study, we managed to identify the entire range of lexical means, with the help of which the author constructs and describes the image of the main characters of his stories. Based on the analysis of quotations and excerpts, it was found that the majority of lexical and stylistic devices are represented in Mo Yan’s texts with the help of tropical figures that gravitate to linguistics, unmarked vocabulary or groups of words by lexical meaning. Using the method of percentage transformation, the ratio of all lexical and stylistic units in each work was determined separately. From a literary point of view, the general features of the author’s writing style are outlined: unique features of the images of characters and inanimate objects, authentic motives and gender features of the protagonists of the works. From the point of view of translation studies, the main problems of translating realia and the reasons for the formation of lacuna in the target language were illustrated.