IDENTIFICATION OF THE CHARACTER’S PESSIMISM IN ENGLISH LITERARY

Abstract

The article highlights the ways pessimistic features of the characters may be identified in English literary texts. Literary text is a generalized figurative reflection of reality in all its diversity of individual and social manifestations. Since the analyzed fragments of fiction are stylized speech, we consider the literary text to be a reflected reality that explicates certain fragments of reality and captures real communicative situations, acquiring at the same time a certain pragmatic potential. The analysis of the lexical context has revealed a set of language means that directly or indirectly indicate the pessimistic dispositions, attributions, mood or cognitive strategies of the literary character. It has been found out that the language units contained in the speech of the characters, author’s remarks and author’s descriptions in English literary texts are direct indicators of the pessimism of literary characters. These include lexical and phraseological units designating pessimism. It has been revealed that the complete identification of the literary character’s pessimism is carried out with the help of the lexical unit pessimism and its derived units pessimist, pessimistic, pessimistically, which indicate the characteristics of individual and social behavior of the personage. Adjectival lexical units, which designate the qualitative features of pessimism, are the means of partial identification of the pessimism of literary characters. Phraseological units which accurately convey the psychological state of the character, express his/her emotions, feelings, experiences and indicate the evaluative attitude to the reality, are powerful means of speech realization of the pessimistic world view in specific communicative conditions. Phraseological units that identify pessimism of the literary character are phraseological units proper and proverbs. Indirect indicators of the literary character’s pessimism are contextual markers of pessimism ‒ fragments of literary texts, in which with the help of linguistic means, characterized by negative semantics of their elements, causes, aspects, consequences and ways of expressing pessimism are captured, confirmed, clarified, completed and explained.