TYPICAL FEMALE CHARACTERS OF THE ENGLISH NOVELS VIEWED THROUGH THE PRISM OF SYNTAX OF THEIR SPEECH

Abstract

The presented work is focused on the analysis of syntactic organization of speech parties belonging to females of certain psychological types as they are represented in the English novel. The author’s introducing a virtual character as a person demonstrating certain psychological and social qualities presupposes reflecting social and cultural relationships traditionally accustomed in a particular national society, as well as their ethical values and moral standards. However, the character’s image taken in by the reader as a personality of a certain type is formed by the reader’s observing him / her both through the eyes of the author, the narrator of the story, and directly in the process of his/her communication with other characters. Numerous heroines of the novels, despite the authors’ attempts to individualize their images, represent certain psycho and sociotypes of women who are intuitively recognized by reading audience. The unshattered in time popularity of the images of Elizabeth Benet and her literary “successor” Bridget Jones is apparently due not to the girls’ appearances as stunning beauties or to their high social statuses, or refined manners of behaviour , since they are too different. Thus, there should be but something in their psychology that unites these two and makes them so much recognisable as one and the same type. The authors of the given paper ground upon the literary classification of the main female characters (D. Rampton, 2019) as pink characters (embody the features of a domestic angel), belle damе (charming, but cunning demons) and assertive heroine (defend their point of view, honest and direct). The objective of the research undertaken consists in identifying syntactic speech characteristics typical of each type of the literary character for the purpose of disclosing psycholinguistic factor of their popularity with the reading public. In our study, we analyzed syntactic organization of the speech parties of the above three types of heroines in the English novel. In order to understand the psychological essence of the types in question , their speech was considered in two aspects of communication: 1) woman (heroine) – other women; 2) woman (heroine_) – man. The females speech parties were studied according to the following parameters: the communicative sentences types and their surface structure organisation. The results of the analysis showed that assertive heroines manifest the smallest deviation in the frequency of use of different sentences types in their communication with men and women, hence demonstrating their honesty and lack of pretence on their part. They are understandable and sincere in their views and actions, which makes them desirable partners and reliable friends for men and women.