ACTUALIZATION OF CONNOTATIVE DOMINANT WITHIN CHRONOTOPE IN ENGLISH FANTASY TEXTS

Abstract

The article is devoted to the identification of dominant linguistic means used to convey expressive, emotive and evaluative connotations when describing the chronotope in English fantasy texts of the late 20th century. Chronotope in fantasy texts plays one of the key roles, since the very nature of fantasy is directly related to the creation of a secondary world full of magic creatures or phenomena. One of the essential features of such a world is its credibility, which requires the author to elaborate the informative and pragmatic component. When describing the secondary world in the analyzed fantasy texts, the authors pay considerable attention to the connotative aspect, using a wide range of linguistic units with an additional expressive, emotive, and evaluative component of meaning, since it is precisely such means that maximally embody the intentions embedded in the image of the secondary world. Connotations in the texts are actualized vie figurative language that functions to strengthen certain features possessed by the space, time and magic within the framework of the chronotope, demonstrate the characters' emotional perception of them, and provide evaluation of their certain properties. The connotative dominant includes a set of linguistic means containing the subject's expressive, emotive or evaluative attitude towards a certain object, which prevail in the text. According to the results of the analysis, it was established that the most common connotative component in the analyzed English fantasy texts is expressivity, and the dominant means of its implementation are expressive means of the syntactic, lexical, and phonetic-graphic levels. Emotivity, depending on the text, makes up from a third to almost a half of linguistic units and is implemented mostly through the means of the lexical and lexical-syntactic language levels. The frequency of using evaluative linguistic means varies widely in the texts, and the most common means of its implementation are linguistic units of the lexical and lexical-syntactic level.