Lexical combinations of contemporary British military fiction: lexical-semantic and stylistic features
Keywords:
interpretation, lexical combinations, lexical-semantic space (LSS), literary and pragmatic stylistics, military fiction (MF), thematic lexicon.
Abstract
This article focuses on the lexical-semantic features of the language means of contemporary British military fiction. Despite the sustained philological attention to fictional texts of different genres, the relative disregard of the lexical patterning in fiction on military themes stands in need of scrutiny. In order to account for all the lingual and extralingual factors influencing the process of fictional text composition, this article takes a philological approach and conducts an integrated analysis – combining linguistic and literary-theoretical perspectives – of the lexical patterning of contemporary military fiction. Our aim is to establish the main lexical-semantic and stylistic peculiarities of the dominant lexical combinations in contemporary British fiction with macro-, meso- and micro-inclusions of military themes. Functions of the thematic lexicon connected with the war topic are more obvious in the literary texts with macro- and meso-inclusions of military themes. However, their role in the texts with micro-inclusions of military themes is quite significant as well: the details of the military environment and phenomena serve as a means of establishing a close connection between the reader and the storyworld; recollections of the war period echo in the plot line of the characters, reflecting its destructive consequences even long afterwards.
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References
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Fischer-Starcke, B. (2010). Corpus linguistics in literary analysis: Jane Austin and her contemporaries. London: Continuum.
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Harris, J. (2002). Five quarters of the orange. London: Black Swan.
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Head, D. (2002). The Cambridge introduction to modern British fiction, 1950-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hickey, L. (1993). Stylistics, pragmatics and pragmastylistics. Belgian review of philology and histor [Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire]. Modern languages and literatures [Langues et littératures modernes], 71, pp. 573-586.
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Ho, Y. (2011). Corpus stylistics in principles and practice: A stylistic exploration of John Fowles’ The Magus. London and New York: Continuum.
Hoey, M. (2001). Textual interaction: An introduction to written discourse analysis. London and New York: Routledge.
Hope, J., & Wright, L. (2005). Stylistics: A practical coursebook. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11381-4
Ishiguro, K. (2016). The buried giant. New York: Vintage International.
Jeffries, L. (2014). Opposition in discourse: The construction of oppositional meaning. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academy. ISBN: PB: 978-1-4725-2838-4
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Levchenko, N., Lubov, P., Varenikova, O., & Torkut, N. (2021). Communicative model – author, hero, text, recipient in a postmodern novel. Postmodern openings, 12 (3), pp. 96-106. https://doi.org/10.18662/po/12.3/329
Lindas, J. (2013). Engaging with postmodernism: An examination of literature and the canon (Undergraduate honors theses). University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder.
Malcolm, D. (2002). Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
McEwan, I. (2002). Atonement. London: Vintage. ISBN 9780099429791
McEwan, I. (2004). Enduring love. London: Vintage. ISBN 9780099481249
Mills, S. (2005). Feminist stylistics. London: Routledge.
Mitchell, D. S. (2004). Cloud atlas. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.
Morey, P. (2015). Performing identity, intertextuality, race and difference in the South Asian novel in English in L. Platt, S. Upstone (Ed.) Postmodern literature and race (pp. 82-97). New York: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107337022.008
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Paltridge, B. (2006). Discourse analysis: An introduction. London and New York: Continuum. ISBN: PB: 978-0-8264-8557-1
Popova, N. B. (2011). The conceptual representation of the semantic space of a polysemantic word. The Journal of Cheliabinsk State University, volume 52, pp. 114-117. Recovered from: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/kontseptualnoe-predstavlenie-semanticheskogo-prostranstva-mnogoznachnogo-slova/viewer
Salkie, R. (2001). Text and discourse analysis. London: Routledge.
Sarma, G. (2001). The war novel: Hemingway and after (Thesis for the degree of PhD). North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. Recovered from: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/61173
Shapoval, O., Bakhov, I., Mosiichuk, A., Kozachyshyna, O., Pradivlianna, L., & Malashchuk-Vyshnevska, N. (2022). The phenomenon of unreliable narration in the British intellectual prose of the second half of the twentieth century (Golding, Murdoch). Postmodern Openings, 13(2), pp. 273-286. https://doi.org/10.18662/po/13.2/453
Shen, D. (2014). Stylistics and narratology In M. Burke (Ed.) The Routledge handbook of stylistics (pp. 191-205). London and New York: Routledge.
Simon-Vandenbergen, A.-M., & Aijmer, K. (2008). The semantic field of modal certainty: A corpus-based study of English adverbs. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Recovered from: https://www.academia.edu/31643259/The_Semantic_Field_of_Modal_Certainty_A_Corpus_Based_Study_of_English_Adverbs
Smith, A. K. (2000). The second battlefield: Women, modernism and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Tanskanen, S.-K. (2006). Collaborating towards coherence: Lexical cohesion in English Discourse. Ansterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Toolan, M. (2013). Language in literature: An introduction to stylistics. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-340-66214-X
Wagner, H. P. (2010). A history of British, Irish and American literature. Trier: Scientific publisher [Wissenschaftlicher Verlag]. ISBN 9783868212204
Ward, G. (2003). Postmodernism. London: Hodder Headline. ISBN 9780340859704
Warner, Ch. (2014). Literary pragmatics and stylistics In M. Burke (Ed.) The Routledge handbook of stylistics (362-377). London and New York: Routledge.
Waters, S. (2009). The little stranger. London: Hachette Digital.
Wells, J. (2008). Shades of Austen in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. persuasion [Persusasions], No. 30, pp. 101-112.
Ackroyd, P. (1997). Milton in America. London: Nan A. Talese. ISBN 978-0385477086
Al-Hindawi, F. H., & Saffah, M. D. (2019). Literary Pragmatics. Arab World English Journal, 10(2), pp. 394-408. https://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol10no2.30
Alegre, S. M. (2001). Post-war English literature 1945-1990. Open University of Catalonia [Universitat Oberta de Catalunya].
Angermuller, J. (2014). Poststructuralist discourse analysis: Subjectivity in enunciative pragmatics. London: University of Warwick, UK.
Antipina, Ye. S. (2015). The lexical-semantic space of the writer’s diary (Abstract of a thesis for the PhD degree). Ivanovo State Chemical-Technological University, Ivanovo. Recovered from: https://www.dissercat.com/content/leksiko-semanticheskoe-prostranstvo-dnevnika-pisatelya-na-materiale-proizvedenii-ia-bunina
Atkinson, K. (2013). Life after life. London: Random House. ISBN 9781409043799
Bergonzi, B. (1993). Wartime and aftermath: English literature and the background 1939-60. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barlow, A. (2000). The Great War in British literature: Cambridge contexts in literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barnes, J. (1990a). A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. London: Vintage. ISBN 9780679731375
Barnes, J. (1990b). Flaubert’s parrot. London: Vintage. ISBN 0679731369
Barry, S. (2017). Hard times: 20th century conflict dominates historical fiction. The Guardian. Recovered from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/04/20th-century-dominates-historical-fiction-walter-scott-prize#img-1
Black, E. (2006). Pragmatic stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0 7486 2041 9
Boyne, J. (2011). The absolutist. New York: Doubleday.
Boyne, J. (2015). The boy at the top of the mountain. New York: Doubleday.
Boyne, J. (2006). The boy in the striped pyjamas. Oxford: David Fickling Books. ISBN 9780099572862
Brinker, M. (1993). Theme and interpretation In W. Sollors (Ed.) The return of thematic criticism (pp. 21-37). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Recovered from: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674766877
Byatt, A. S. (2010). The children’s book. London: Vintage Books.
Caink, A. (2014). The art of repetition in Muriel Spark’s telling In S. Chapman, B. Clark (Ed.) Pragmatic literary stylistics (pp. 16-35). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Chapman, S., & Clark, B. (2014). Pragmatic literary stylistics. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Clayton, J. W. (2012). Some common themes and ideas within the field of postmodern thought: a handout for HIS 389. Semantic Scholar. Recovered from: http://webs.wofford.edu/whisnantcj/his389/postmodernism.pdf
Cobley, E. (1995). Postmodernist war fiction: Findley’s The Wars. Canadian Literature, No. 147, pp. 98-124.
Fischer-Starcke, B. (2010). Corpus linguistics in literary analysis: Jane Austin and her contemporaries. London: Continuum.
Fowles, J. (1997). The Collector. London: Back Bay Books. ISBN 9780316290234
Fowles, J. (1985). The Magus. London: Dell. ISBN 9780440351627
Gavins, G., & Lahey, E. (2016). World building: Discourse in the mind. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Gee, J. P. (2010a). An introduction to discourse analysis. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-58570-8
Gee, J. P. (2010b). How to do discourse analysis. New York and London: Routledge.
Geeraerts, D. (2009). Theories of lexical semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
Han, J., & Wang, Z. L. (2014). Postmodern strategies in Ian McEwan’s major novels. Advances in Literary Study, volume 2, pp. 134-139. https://dx.doi.org/10.4236/als.2014.24020
Harris, J. (2002). Five quarters of the orange. London: Black Swan.
Hart, J. (2015). The poetics of otherness: War, trauma and literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.
Head, D. (2002). The Cambridge introduction to modern British fiction, 1950-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hickey, L. (1993). Stylistics, pragmatics and pragmastylistics. Belgian review of philology and histor [Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire]. Modern languages and literatures [Langues et littératures modernes], 71, pp. 573-586.
Hidalgo, P. (2005). Memory and storytelling in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, volume 46 (2), pp. 82-91. http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/CRIT.46.2.82-91
Ho, Y. (2011). Corpus stylistics in principles and practice: A stylistic exploration of John Fowles’ The Magus. London and New York: Continuum.
Hoey, M. (2001). Textual interaction: An introduction to written discourse analysis. London and New York: Routledge.
Hope, J., & Wright, L. (2005). Stylistics: A practical coursebook. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11381-4
Ishiguro, K. (2016). The buried giant. New York: Vintage International.
Jeffries, L. (2014). Opposition in discourse: The construction of oppositional meaning. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academy. ISBN: PB: 978-1-4725-2838-4
Kaiter, E. (2016). The war novel, a modernist and postmodernist representation based on history and fiction. Multicultural Representations. Literature and Discourse as Forms of Dialogue, pp. 204-208.
Kemp, P. (2007). The 21st century. encyclopᴂdia Britannica. Recovered from: https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/The-21st-century
Levchenko, N., Lubov, P., Varenikova, O., & Torkut, N. (2021). Communicative model – author, hero, text, recipient in a postmodern novel. Postmodern openings, 12 (3), pp. 96-106. https://doi.org/10.18662/po/12.3/329
Lindas, J. (2013). Engaging with postmodernism: An examination of literature and the canon (Undergraduate honors theses). University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder.
Malcolm, D. (2002). Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
McEwan, I. (2002). Atonement. London: Vintage. ISBN 9780099429791
McEwan, I. (2004). Enduring love. London: Vintage. ISBN 9780099481249
Mills, S. (2005). Feminist stylistics. London: Routledge.
Mitchell, D. S. (2004). Cloud atlas. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.
Morey, P. (2015). Performing identity, intertextuality, race and difference in the South Asian novel in English in L. Platt, S. Upstone (Ed.) Postmodern literature and race (pp. 82-97). New York: Cambridge University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107337022.008
Nicol, B. (2015). X-Ray detectives: Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major and black postmodern detective fiction In L. Platt, S. Upstone (Ed.) Postmodern literature and race (pp. 65-81). New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107337022.007
Paltridge, B. (2006). Discourse analysis: An introduction. London and New York: Continuum. ISBN: PB: 978-0-8264-8557-1
Popova, N. B. (2011). The conceptual representation of the semantic space of a polysemantic word. The Journal of Cheliabinsk State University, volume 52, pp. 114-117. Recovered from: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/kontseptualnoe-predstavlenie-semanticheskogo-prostranstva-mnogoznachnogo-slova/viewer
Salkie, R. (2001). Text and discourse analysis. London: Routledge.
Sarma, G. (2001). The war novel: Hemingway and after (Thesis for the degree of PhD). North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. Recovered from: http://hdl.handle.net/10603/61173
Shapoval, O., Bakhov, I., Mosiichuk, A., Kozachyshyna, O., Pradivlianna, L., & Malashchuk-Vyshnevska, N. (2022). The phenomenon of unreliable narration in the British intellectual prose of the second half of the twentieth century (Golding, Murdoch). Postmodern Openings, 13(2), pp. 273-286. https://doi.org/10.18662/po/13.2/453
Shen, D. (2014). Stylistics and narratology In M. Burke (Ed.) The Routledge handbook of stylistics (pp. 191-205). London and New York: Routledge.
Simon-Vandenbergen, A.-M., & Aijmer, K. (2008). The semantic field of modal certainty: A corpus-based study of English adverbs. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Recovered from: https://www.academia.edu/31643259/The_Semantic_Field_of_Modal_Certainty_A_Corpus_Based_Study_of_English_Adverbs
Smith, A. K. (2000). The second battlefield: Women, modernism and the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Tanskanen, S.-K. (2006). Collaborating towards coherence: Lexical cohesion in English Discourse. Ansterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Toolan, M. (2013). Language in literature: An introduction to stylistics. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-340-66214-X
Wagner, H. P. (2010). A history of British, Irish and American literature. Trier: Scientific publisher [Wissenschaftlicher Verlag]. ISBN 9783868212204
Ward, G. (2003). Postmodernism. London: Hodder Headline. ISBN 9780340859704
Warner, Ch. (2014). Literary pragmatics and stylistics In M. Burke (Ed.) The Routledge handbook of stylistics (362-377). London and New York: Routledge.
Waters, S. (2009). The little stranger. London: Hachette Digital.
Wells, J. (2008). Shades of Austen in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. persuasion [Persusasions], No. 30, pp. 101-112.
Published
2022-10-10
How to Cite
Shainer, I., Bekhta, I., Karp, M., Tatarovska, O., & Kovalevska, T. (2022). Lexical combinations of contemporary British military fiction: lexical-semantic and stylistic features. Amazonia Investiga, 11(55), 29-39. https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2022.55.07.3
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