Language and style in The Gruffalo

IF 0.6 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Language and Literature Pub Date : 2022-01-27 DOI:10.1177/09639470211072162

M. Burke

引用次数: 0

Abstract

This article studies the popular children’s book The Gruffalo (1999) written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler. Its popularity is attested to by the fact that the book has sold over 13.5 million copies and has been translated into more than 80 different languages. The question that this article seeks to address is, to what extent has the language and style of The Gruffalo played a part in these commercial and cultural achievements? The article primarily explores the phenomena of meter, rhyme, rhythm and lexical repetition from interrelated linguistic and stylistic perspectives. It also brings these findings into a dialogue with some of the precepts and principles from both classical rhetoric and modern orality theory, especially pertaining to memory and delivery. Having weighed the linguistic evidence, the supposition is put forward that it is highly probable that the motivated language choices that have been made by the author, and the way those choices have been arranged and deployed in the story, have played a substantial role in the book’s success.

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《格鲁法洛》中的语言和风格

本文研究了由Julia Donaldson撰写、Axel Scheffler绘制插图的儿童畅销书《Gruffalo》（1999）。这本书已售出1350多万册，并被翻译成80多种不同的语言，这证明了它的受欢迎程度。这篇文章试图解决的问题是，《格鲁法洛》的语言和风格在多大程度上促成了这些商业和文化成就？本文主要从语言学和文体的角度探讨了韵律、韵律和词汇重复现象。它还将这些发现与古典修辞学和现代口语理论中的一些戒律和原则进行了对话，尤其是与记忆和表达有关的戒律和原则。在权衡了语言学证据后，提出了一种假设，即作者做出的有动机的语言选择，以及这些选择在故事中的安排和部署方式，很可能对这本书的成功起到了重要作用。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Language and Literature Multiple-

CiteScore

1.70

自引率

14.30%

发文量

期刊介绍： Language and Literature is an invaluable international peer-reviewed journal that covers the latest research in stylistics, defined as the study of style in literary and non-literary language. We publish theoretical, empirical and experimental research that aims to make a contribution to our understanding of style and its effects on readers. Topics covered by the journal include (but are not limited to) the following: the stylistic analysis of literary and non-literary texts, cognitive approaches to text comprehension, corpus and computational stylistics, the stylistic investigation of multimodal texts, pedagogical stylistics, the reading process, software development for stylistics, and real-world applications for stylistic analysis. We welcome articles that investigate the relationship between stylistics and other areas of linguistics, such as text linguistics, sociolinguistics and translation studies. We also encourage interdisciplinary submissions that explore the connections between stylistics and such cognate subjects and disciplines as psychology, literary studies, narratology, computer science and neuroscience. Language and Literature is essential reading for academics, teachers and students working in stylistics and related areas of language and literary studies.