The category of intensity in A. P. Gaidar’s short story "The Blue Cup": linguistic forms and symbolisation (to the 90th anniversary of the short story)

The article discusses previously unexamined functions of the category of intensity in a literary text. Namely, the primary focus is on modeling the main symbolic antithesis of the story, i. e., "light–darkness", and expressing a child’s worldview within this model. In the first stage, lexical units filling the symbolic light–darkness "frame" were identified. The study relies on a functional-semantic method of describing linguistic units in conjunction with semantic-semiotic symbol modeling. In this literary text, the perceptual image of light, shine, and the colour of fire is conveyed not only by words with light-related semantics such as solntse, sverkat’, blestyashchii, ozarit’ (English sun, sparkle, shiny, illuminate), and others, but also by colour-related words including krasnyi, zheltyi, ryzhii (English red, yellow, red-haired), and so on. The signifier of the "darkness" symbol – the perceptual image of darkness – is expressed by such words as vecher, tuchi, potemnet’, chernyi, seryi (English evening, clouds, to darken, black, grey), and others. The signified of the symbol "light" – ‘life, joy, and happiness’ – is represented by words with the semantics of life and joy including khoroshii, schastlivyi, zasmeyat’sya, mirit’sya (English good, happy, to start laughing, to make up), and others. The signified of the symbol "darkness" – ‘death, evil, and grudge’ – is represented by plokhoi, rasserdit’sya, smert, kladbishche, vojna (English bad, to get angry, death, cemetery, war), and so on. The research strategy involves incorporating the category of intensity into the symbolic "light–darkness" framework. The category transforms the symbolic schema into living images and shapes the child’s emotional and intellectual familiarisation with the surrounding world manifesting itself in four interconnected distinctive features. These include: 1) the physical motion of humans and nature; 2) the grotesqueness of images as extreme exaggeration; 3) world modelling through Svetlana’s eyes, i. e., the horizontal plane of the surroundings, the lower and the upper worlds; 4) evaluativity and emotionality. Linguistic forms of intensity imbue the symbol components with life, motion, and emotions materialising the struggle between light and darkness through various forms of the physical and psychological worlds. The most common means of expressing intensity are degree adverbs, semelfactive verbs, verbs of motion in homogeneous constructions, intensifying particles such as dazhe, tolko (English even, only), and the augmentative suffixes -ushch-, -enn- (bolshushchii, shirochennyi) (English humongous, very wide).

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