LINGUOSTYLISTIC MEANS OF VERBALIZATION OF THE LEXICAL SEMANTIC FIELD “DEATH” (BASED ON THE COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES “THE KING IN YELLOW” BY R. CHAMBERS)

Abstract

Over the past century, the concept of horror, as well as its place in the linguistic picture of the world, has undergone significant changes. It is stipulated by social changes to some extent, but the development of horror fiction as a genre, which originated from ghost stories and gothic prose, also plays an important role.
Yet, suspense still remains the central element of short horror prose. For a long time it was believed that this effect is achieved exclusively by creating an appropriate atmosphere, but these statements lacked specificity: how exactly this atmosphere is created, what mechanisms are responsible for the making the reader terrified. The wording of the literary critic H.P. Lovecraft, from which most linguists are starting in the study of horror fiction, is also very vague: «The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown».
The collection of short stories by Robert William Chambers “The King in Yellow”, which had a significant impact on the development of the English-language school of horrors, was chosen as an example. The study revealed that in each story from the “The Yellow Mythos” series, the author refers to the lexical semantic field “death” because of the stable negative connotations of the recipient with this phenomenon. Verbalization of the field (and, accordingly, the heightening of suspense) occurs according to an algorithm consisting of the following points: 1. The trope with ambiguous interpretation, which indicates the presence of injury or illness. 2. The trope that specifies the nature of the injury or illness. 3. The trope that links injury or illness to characters, objects or events from “The Yellow Mythos”. 4. The trope that indicates the development of the disease or the aggravation of the state of injury. 5. The trope that describes the world of Carcosa through injury or disease.
The algorithm is universal for the analyzed four stories (“The Repairer of Reputations”, “The Mask”, “In the Court of the Dragon”, “The Yellow Sign”); by all signs it is also present in the works of other authors. The prospect of further research is the verification of the algorithm for its universality, as well as consideration of the verbalization of other lexical semantic fields of the negative group on similar material.