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REVEALING LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF PTSD IN THE NOVEL THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER BY THE AMERICAN WRITER STEPHEN CHBOSKY // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2019. Issue 5 (202). P. 38-44

Introduction. The study presents an analysis of the novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky’s attempt at reproducing/imitating the speech of a teenager suffering from an emotional distress. The aim of the article is to unveil major linguistic principles of organizing a posttraumtic discourse. Material and methods. Charlie’s letters to a stranger are approached from a psycholinguistic perspective. The fictional text is viewed as a psychosemantic element, thus not only general psychological symptoms (such as emotional distraction, hyper-arousal, avoiding thoughts of the traumatic event, etc.) are taken into consideration but also its linguistic features. The research is rooted in the idea of the potential of certain figures of speech (for instance, metaphors) to both manifest cognitive processes and hide inner tribulations, either conscious or subconscious. Results and discussion. The research has revealed the following linguistic indicators of PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder): 1) “A strange object” affects the theme and rheme development and is a binding factor for associative chain of thoughts. 2) Compulsive syntactic parallelisms result in a cyclical nature of an utterance. 3) Avoiding thoughts of a traumatic event is achieved through cutting down the sentences, once becoming run-on sentences are finished abruptly by Charlie himself saying he no longer remembers what happened next. 4) The tension of the signified translates to tension in syntactical structures making up the signifier (it can be revealed by means of a growing number of negative sentences in one and the same paragraph; or in a constant use of the conjunction ‘and’ at the beginning of sentences). 5) Almost no metaphors are tracked in Charles’ speech, which might be a sign of predominantly metonymy-based cognitive processes, or other deep mental structures. Conclusion. The analysis of linguistic data at the syntactic, semantic, and structural level of the text makes it possible to identify predictors of PTSD, which can be used in psycholinguistic studies and training sessions on the interpretation of the text.

Keywords: psycholinguistics, posttraumatic discourse, syntax, semantics, structure