PRAGMATIC FUNTIONS OF THE STYLISTIC DEVICES IN THE AUTHOR’S CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MAIN CHARACTER (ON THE MATERIAL OF «DEATH OF A HERO» BY RICHARD ALDINGTON)

Abstract

The article dwells on the peculiarities of the author’s usage of different stylistic devices. Richard Aldington uses a variety of lexical and grammatical stylistic devices in his outstanding novel «Death of a Hero». He is trying to implicitly show his readers his real attitude towards both his main character and the setting the latter operates in. The author constantly leads an indirect dialogue with his readers in order to make them understand the real course of events, but instead of addressing them directly and persuading them to take his point of view as a truly accurate one, Richard Aldington uses a whole range of creative metaphors, similes, hyperbolas, allusions, epithets, parallel constructions and other stylistic devices to convey the true meaning of what he describes. His usage of figures of speeches serves a double purpose: a stylistic one, i.e. to beautify the text and make it linguistically and literary rich, and a pragmatic one, i.e to serve as a source of additional information. The article makes an attempt to find the correlation between these two functions and to come to the conclusions concerning their role in the description of the main character.