Identification of women and men images in the fictional discourse of Olga Slavnikaya and Sarah Hall

Abstract

This work is carried out within the framework of anthropocentric linguistics, which focuses on the “man in language”. The main purpose of the study is to reveal specific ways of identifying men and women images in the modern female linguistic picture of the world. The research is based on the fictional discourse of Olga Slavnikova and Sarah Hall, contemporary female authors of Russian and English literature. The comparative analysis of the two pieces of discourse helps to reveal the individual characteristics of the female authors, as well as the national characteristics of the two linguistic worldviews. The novelty of this work is the first identification of men and women images from a female point of view. The study revealed that in the modern woman’s linguistic picture, the images of men and women differ from the established stereotypes due to their negative assessment and degradation of images. In lexical-semantic terms, female authors use various methods, the most active being connotative tropes and evaluative adjectives. The authors often refer to the zoomorphic image when identifying themselves and representatives of the opposite sex, and the assessment of a man is given through his comparison to a woman. To achieve the goal, the following methods were used: the descriptive, comparative, contextual methods and the stylistic analysis.