The Old Man and the Sea Revisited in a Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

Hemingway’s novel The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature two years later. As an excellent work created by Hemingway, the language style of the Old Man and the Sea highlights Hemingway’s literary characteristics. He likes to use simple and colloquial language and flexible collocation of verbs and nouns to drive the plot development of the story, and then combine various rhetorical devices with his own language style to enrich the ideas of the whole novel. Many creative skills make the whole novel memorable, fully show the linguistic features of the Old Man and the Sea. From the perspective of linguistics, this paper analyzes the unique aesthetic style created by the powerful expression techniques in the novel. This paper analyzes the novel from two perspectives: linguistic features and metaphorical meaning. In terms of linguistic features, this paper mainly analyzes the concise language style, the ingenious use of personal pronouns and the appropriate code-switching. In terms of metaphorical meaning, this paper mainly analyzes the metaphorical meaning of the old man, the sea, the shark and marlin and the lion in this novel.