STYLISTIC FEATURES OF INFANT POETRY TEXTS

Abstract

The article deals with the linguistic and stylistic features of the Englishlanguage infant poetry texts (for preschool-aged children). The place and role of prevalent stylistic figures are determined. The object of the research is the English-language infant poetic texts, and the subject is their linguistic and stylistic specifics. The purpose of the study is to characterize the linguistic and stylistic colouring of preschool-aged children’s speech at the lexical level in the English-language infant poetic texts. The stylistic division of the English-language infant texts vocabulary is quite diverse: common, specific, everyday, emotional and spatial vocabulary. The artistry of such texts differs in the extensive use of expressive, emotionally depicted elements of speech. Common vocabulary includes words related to everyday life, denoting vital concepts: plants, animals, natural phenomena, qualities, feelings, and so on. Household vocabulary includes tokens related to food, farming, city life, nature and fairy tales. Emotional vocabulary is manifested on the morpheme level by the affixal type, on the lexical by the infantile creative words, the use of words with expressive meaning, on the syntactic by the manifestation of emotions at the level of phrases, sentences or expressions. Common-speech vocabulary is used in terms of ease and everyday life. It has been found that the dominant figures are figures of addition, which account for 57%, and the rest are the figures of substitution (43%). Figures of addition in infantile poetic texts for preschoolers include epithets, amplification and antithesis, while figures of substitution include personification, comparison and metaphor. The figures of addition in English-language infant poetic texts give picturesqueness to objects and phenomena, strengthening their characteristics, emphasizing the beauty of the ordinary things. They increase the expressiveness, interest, daydreaming, extraordinary things in the mind of a preschool-aged child. The use of substitution figures, which are the most importantly harmonious stylistic means leads to musicality, harmony of sound. The tendency to vivid imagery excites to wrap thoughts in new, expressive speech shells, using words in an unusual sense. Thus, English-language infant poetic texts are saturated with charm, fabulousness, surrealism due to the use of these stylistic means.