Subject-speech organisation of Vladimir Kornilov's short story “Cone Picker”

Abstract

The article presents a philological analysis of the linguistic means that determine the originality of the subject-speech organisation of the story written by Vladimir Kornilov, Kostroma prose writer of the second half of the 20th century. The purpose of the study is to identify the structural-semantic and pragmatic properties ofthe language units that form the speech plans of the primary narrator and the main character acting as a storyteller. The article analyses the leading language techniques and means of colloquial speech stylization – dialogisation of a monologue word; the use of colloquial and dialect vocabulary, Russian proverbs; folk interpretations of the semantics of words. Kostroma dialect words are involved in the creation of the character's speech portrait and reflect regional cultural and linguistic features. The article examines the key metaphorical images created by the lexical and syntactic language units. It also studies the comparative figures of speech that reveal the dialectical unity of nature and human. Rhetorical questions and aphoristic phrases of the narrator serve as expressive characteristics of the events and actions of the characters. The author of the article elaborates on the fragments of the tale narration in which the main idea of the story and the author's point of view are expressed. The pragmatic potential of the language units is manifested in their active influence on the structural and content organisation offictional narration. The lexical dominants ‘deed’ and ‘concord’ unite the separate compositional parts of the story into a common narrative space and actualise the philosophical meaning of the short story. The interaction of the primary narrator’s speech and the storyteller’s speech forms a two-voiced narration, creating textual polyphony. As a result of the study of the linguistic features of Vladimir Kornilov's short story, the author of the article brings into focus a system of language means and stylisation techniques that determine the originality of the subjective organisation of the narrative, explicate the conceptual content of the text and ensure its structural and semantic unity.