MACROTEXTUAL CONNOTATION OF KEYWORDS IN LITERARY TEXT

Abstract

The article is dedicated to studying the issue of connotation within a literary text. A detailed theoretical review of existing studies on connotation among domestic linguists is carried out, outlining the leading research directions. It is determined that in the field of textological research, the concept of connotation has been considered only concerning certain linguistic phenomena. Connotation, in traditional linguistic perspective, is explicated as an evaluative, value-oriented, emotive component of meaning, which contains information about the speaker’s attitude towards the reality and has a certain expressive effect. The article proposes an approach to interpreting connotation on the textual level, reflecting its sense-forming properties. Connotation at the level of holistic understanding of a literary text is interpreted as macrotextual connotation, which implies the enhancement of emotive-expressive, evaluative and value-oriented, or other pragmatic components of meaning according to the author’s artistic-ideological intention embedded in the literary text. For the linguistic analysis of macrotextual connotation, the concept of keywords as lexical markers of semantic accumulation within the literary text is involved. The focus is on one keyword, ‘normal’, chosen based on artistic literary interpretation of the analyzed text. The research material is the literary text of Sally Rooney’s novel “Normal People”. Lexicographical definitions are analyzed to determine the semantic components of the meaning of the chosen keyword. The next stage of the research is a contextual-interpretative analysis aimed at clarifying the specificity of the keyword ‘normal’ in the context of plot situations the novel. It is concluded that the macrotextual connotation of keywords is manifested by comparing the main semantic components of meaning found in dictionary definitions with the holistic interpretation of the ideological-thematic content the novel. In the analyzed literary text, the macrotextual connotation was realized by antonymizing the meaning of ‘normal’ and creating semantic ambiguity through antithesis with its opposite meaning.