The means of conveying ironic expressivity in N. A. Teffi’s short stories (to the 150th anniversary of the birth)

Abstract

The article aims to identify the linguistic means (first of all those which can be considered as marking the writer’s individual style) employed in N. A. Teffi’s short stories to convey ironic comicality. The research was performed with the use of the descriptive, linguostylistic, semantic methods, componential analysis, and elements of statistical analysis. As a result, the undertaken study made it possible to identify a wide range of linguistic units belonging to different linguistic levels. The combination of these units and various stylistic devices which were revealed while analysing the expressive speech structure of humorous texts results in the maximal humorous effect. The paper concludes that subtle irony viewed as the dominant expressive colouring of the text in humorous stories by N. Teffi and the device that marks her individual style is created with the help of various linguistic means. These means can be roughly divided into two groups: the basic humour-building and background ones. The latter group facilitates a more obvious manifestation of ironic comicality. The first group includes pun and non-pun means of conveying ironic expressivity. As for non-pun linguistic means, elements of the stylistics of the absurd, paradox, oxymoron, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, chiasmus, periphrasis, allusion, ellipsis, parallelism, simile, refrain, radical transformation of phraseological units are characteristic of Teffi’s individual style. With regard to the means of expressing irony build on pun, Teffi employs units of language and speech with identical and similar expression planes. Polysemy, usual and occasional homonymy in combination with such lexical and lexical-phonetic means of explication of phonetized puns as usual and occasional paronomasia and – more rarely – homophony form the lexical basis of semanticised puns. The author often uses amphibology and the literalization of phraseological units to produce ironic punning effect. The second group includes auxiliary means of creating ironic effect: imitation of children’s speech, the technique of speech self-disclosure, citation, macaronic language, spoken colloquial phraseology, colloquialisms and obsolescent grammatical orthoepic variants, charactonyms and parodic surnames.