Прагматичні функції стилістичних засобів в діалогічному мовленні героїв роману Річарда Олдінгтона «Death of a hero»

Abstract

This article deals the role and place of stylistic devices in a work of art in the literary pragmatics context. Operating on the level «author – work – reader», literary pragmatics offers an interpretation of the text together in the light of hidden information. The paper focuses on the stylistic analysis of the dialogues of the characters in Richard Aldington’s novel “Death of a Hero” and defining the pragmatic functions of the given stylistic devices as source of implicit information. In addition to direct descriptions, Richard Aldington characterizes his characters through their speech. Stylistic figures in the dialogues help to assess the situation and understand the way of thinking of characters and their personal features. Phonetic and graphic stylistic devices often indicate the social background of the speaker, his emotional state and situations in which dialogues take palce. Syntactic stylistic means in dialogues are usually broken sentences, they do not add much aesthetic beauty or understanding of ideas, but they allow the author to make characters more believable so that readers feel for them. Syntactic stylistic devices in the dialogues of the novel provide readers with an opportunity to complete the thought of the character, to understand the course of their thoughts. The most frequently used stylistic devices in the dialogues of the novel Richard Aldington are of a lexical stratum; they not only enrich the language of a character, but also allow to evaluate their intelligence, depth of knowledge, imagination level, social background, age group, era. It is thanks to the stylistic devices that the author implicitly manages to explain that there has always been an abyss of misunderstanding between the protagonist and his surrounding, regardless of where he was at a certain stage of life. The contrast of the use of tropes in the speech of the protagonist before and after he became a soldier, demonstrating the fundamental changes in his outlook, shows a particularly important pragmatic function of the stylistic devices usage.