ELIZABETH MARCH’S LANGUAGE PERSONALITY IN “LITTLE WOMEN” BY LOUISA MAY ALCOTT: VERBAL-SEMANTIC LEVEL

Abstract

The aim of the article was to analyse lexical-semantic and structural-syntactic aspects of Elizabeth (Beth) March’s speech behaviour, who embodies the language personality of a shy educated teenage American girl of the XIX century. In order to fulfil this aim, the following tasks were performed: to choose lexical items typical of Beth’s language personality, to determine their semantic and connotative meanings, and to describe the syntactic features of her speech behavior. The object of this research was verbal representation of Elizabeth March in the dialogues of the novel, and its subject was lexical-semantic and syntactic features of the heroine’s language personality. The data for the research was taken from Louise May Olcott’s novel ’Little Women’, namely Beth’s lines in dialogues, which were selected by the method of continuous sampling. The analysis reflects the modern linguistic trend to study the language from the anthropocentric standpoint, which determines the relevance, as well as scientific novelty of the research. As Beth is a modest and timid ’little woman’, the analysis of her speech in the novel shows that she only participates in communication when it comes to topics of interest to her, namely family, music, and service to people. The typical features of her idiostyle at lexical-semantic level are expressiveness and emotional coloring: she uses axiologically-marked adjectives with positive and negative evaluative meaning, adverbs that emphasize and enhance the meaning of features expressed by adjectives, as well as modal verbs. Typical syntactic structures used by Beth include conditional sentences, emphatic structures with “such” and “how”, and the emphatic use of the auxiliary verb “do”. The results of this study complement and expand scientific research on the verbal-semantic level of a language personality as an object of linguistic analysis.