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THE STRUCTURAL DIVERSITY OF THE FEMININE COMPARISONS IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE NOVEL THE KUKOTSKY ENIGMA BY L. ULITSKAYA // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2018. Issue 2 (191). P. 91-98

The significance of research is attributed to the constant attention of linguists paid to the discourse of women’s prose and to the usage of the components of functional-semantic categories, including the category «comparativeness», in the language of artistic works. The article considers the participation of different structural comparisons in the description of the female characters in the novel The Kukotsky Enigma by Lyudmila Ulitskaya. The structural diversity of comparisons is presented within the functional-semantic field of comparativeness. All forms of comparatives are present in the language of the novel, with conjunctional comparisons by similarity prevailing. From comparisons on the difference, there are forms of comparative and negative parallelisms. The gender approach to describing femininely marked comparatives facilitates to identify idiostyle characteristics of the writer, namely the tendency to extend and concretize the image of comparison, the usage of comparisons for the comparison of heroines, the author’s boldness and frankness of comparative images as well as the images’ allusiveness, and axiological differences between feminine comparisons in the speech of the characters and in the author’s speech. The article pays attention to the text-forming function of comparatives in the broad sense in the language of the novel The Kukotsky Enigma by Lуudmila Ulitskaya, namely to «the correlation of the tropes and realities».

Keywords: gender, feminine comparison, the methods of expressing the semantic category «comparativeness», allusions, Ulitskaya’s novel The Kukotsky Enigma

THE PARTICIPATION OF EQUALITY AND INEQUALITY COMPARATIVES IN THE EXPLICATION OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MAIN CHARACTER ELENA IN L. ULITSKAYA’S NOVEL THE KUKOTSKY ENIGMA // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2019. Issue 7 (204). P. 17-23

The article features the comparative characteristics of the main heroine in L. Ulitskaya’s novel The Kukotsky Enigma and combines two topical approaches: the functional-semantic approach, connected with the text explications of units in the functional-semantic field “comparativeness”, and the gender-linguistic approach. The second approach actualizes feminine-oriented comparatives, namely: the forms of the images of comparisons (comparatives of equality) and the forms of the signs of difference (comparatives of inequality), the “targets” of which are explications of the external and internal appearance of Elena Kukotsky. The purpose of the article is to identify and analyze the structural and substantive diversity of the comparatives involved in the character’s thematic grid of Elena, identifying the author’s idiostyle features. We use the primary linguistic description (collection of materials, classification and interpretation), as well as contextual and transformational methods. Appeal to the chronotopic, discourse and sensory levels in the comparative characteristics of Elena, we can see her various manifestations in life, the polysemy of the heroine because of different attitude expressed by other heroes and the narrator, her self-expression, the variability of her assessments. An important role in the discourse representation of the heroine “from the inside” is played by Elena’s notebooks, in which feminine-oriented comparatives participate in the expression of her self-criticism, linguistic creativity, fantasy in the use of occasionalisms, unexpected metaphorical images, including expanded ones. The comparative character’s grid of Elena is represented by a wide variety of comparisons of quality (comparisonassimilations and metaphors) and comparatives of inequality (forms of degrees of comparisons of characteristic words and forms of subjective assessment of quality). In front of readers there is a visual, odor, auditory (the sensory level) appearance of this young woman, charming by her fragility; it is difficult to imagine her face; readers themselves draw her portrait. In the comparative characteristics of the heroine, first of all, her inner appearance (moods, joyfulness, but for the most part difficult experiences, value proposition in her picture of the world) is explicated. The participation of the comparatives in the creation of the image of Elena manifests their pronounced text-forming function, with the particular use of the approach “the correlation of trops and realia”. The results of the analysis contribute to the systematization of knowledge about the expressive ways of comparatives in the language of artistic texts; and their description makes a definite contribution to the theory of imagery.

Keywords: gender, femininity, comparatives of equality and inequality, subject of comparison, image of comparison, metaphor, L. Ulitskaya’s novel The Kukotsky Enigma