Stylistic Functions of Nominative Parts of Speech in Stereotype Personage Creation

Abstract

The article is devoted to analysis of lexico-morphological devices used in the process of creation of stereotyped personage image in adventure novels. Such personages are clearly marked by the author's axiological attitude. Both the characteristics and the means of their expression can be constantly used by different authors; thus we deal with the phenomenon of personage stereotype. The choice of our investigation material is determined by the fact that in an adventure novel the ethic opposition is based on the fundamental contrastive conceptions of human morality - evil and goodness, honesty and falsity. The primary contrast which isn't tinted but, inversely, is explicitly emphasized by authors, is the constant feature of adventure poetics. In this paper we concentrate our attention on basic functions of nominative parts of speech (nouns and adjectives) in stereotype personage characterization and their formalized, standardized nature. The quantitative method of analysis of the judgmental lexicon which directly expresses the author's attitude to his characters, allowed us to determine that the most frequent category in the glossary, and in the text, is evaluative adjective (66.5% of the total number of selected lexical units constituting the vocabulary of descriptive fragments). In most cases these words appear in the function of epithets and indicate the principal ethical and external features in portrayals of SP. The fact of adjectives' domination in portrait characteristics of characters in adventure stories certainly reflects their overall dominance in the system of evaluation of the English lexicon, and that is indicated by many researchers (Frenkel, 1982). According to them evaluation as one of the aspects of pragmatics, is a part of many lexical units, combined with the corresponding designative components of meaning, but is most clearly expressed in the system of adjectives. Grammatical invariant meaning of adjectives in modern English is quality, which is associated with the assessment and through it - with emotionality and expressiveness (Morokhovskiy, 1991). The portrait description of a literary personage is characterized by a large number of attributive phrases, where the basic meaning of the adjective is enriched with secondary differential features - qualitative estimates or shades of subjective evaluation (Morokhovskiy, 1991, p. 78). The commonest model of such phrases in the texts under study is a combination of an adjective and a noun - A + N, where a substantive component acts as basic and adjective - as a dependent component in relation to the noun. Stylistic