MARKEME ANALYSIS OF JOHN DONNE’S PROSE LANGUAGE

Abstract

Statement of the problem. The paper aims at formal semantic analysis of John Donne’s prose language. According to the purpose, the tasks of determining key words – markemes – and then the markeme peculiarity of Donne’s texts have been solved. Results. When the texts had been processed with the program ProTemAl-Engl we got the author’s markeme list. Then we conducted quantitative and qualitative analysis of the markemes followed by their semantic classification. Quantitative analysis considered the author’s weight of the markemes, their inverted ranks, frequency and distribution in semantic sets of markemes. Markemes stratification made it possible to distinguish core and peripheral markemes in Donne’s prose. Qualitative analysis was based on semantic analysis of dominant and vice-dominant markemes and included the procedure of semantic classification of the markemes. Quantitative and qualitative analysis allowed specifying markeme peculiarity of Donne’s prose language. Conclusion. In Donne’s prose, considerationis the dominant markeme and contemplation is the vice-dominant one. The markeme core includes 17 markemes and the markeme periphery includes 34 markemes. Besides the presence of 17 synonyms from 7 synonymic markeme groups the peculiarity of Donne’s markeme list is determined by 10 groups of markemes which possess the same inverted ranks. There are 29 such markemes. The same rank of the markemes in each group means that all of them are of the same importance to the author. There are three main semantic sets in Donne’s prose. They are fundamental notions, mental and perceptual markemes and emotionally charged markemes. According to the number of markemes, their frequency in the text and their author’s weights, the semantic set of fundamental notions is predominant. It includes both religious and semantically connected with them notions.