The stylistic devices of using onomatopoeic words in Vitaly Bianki’s works

Abstract

The article explores the ways onomatopoeic words function in children’s fiction. The aim of the study is to identify the functional and stylistic distinctive features of using onomatopoeic vocabulary in Vitaly Bianki’s short stories and fairy tales. Onomatopoeic words are an important expressive means which characterises the individual style of the writer considered to be one of the founders of the Soviet nature prose. Such words reflect the author’s subjective emotional attitude to the natural world and perform important stylistic functions (figurative, characterizing, expressive, heuristic, aesthetic, and others) in his works written for children. To achieve the aim, the methods of functional and stylistic analysis were employed. As a result, the paper identifies the basic techniques exploited to actualise the onomatopoeic component of lexical units in V. V. Bianki’s prose. It has been found that the onomatopoeic usage patterns reveal the fundamentals of the naturalist writer’s view of life and his creative manner.