Структура и семантика иронических сравнений в произведениях С. Кинга

Вопросы психолингвистики. 2018. № 3. С. 50–63.

Nagornaya A.

The paper considers the use of ironic simile in S. King’s prose. Ironic simile is defined as a type of simile, which formally states a similarity between two objects and semantically subverts it. The topicality of the research is accounted for by the need to study ironic simile as a phenomenon and by the increasing scholarly interest in individual uses of cognitive and language resources. The research was conducted on the basis of 13 novels and one novelette written by S. King, with the total volume amounting to 8867 pages. The corpus of examples was collected manually and includes 20 units, each of them unique in the sense that it belongs exclusively to S. King and occurs in his texts only once. The paper describes two models on which King’s ironic similes are based: as + adjective + as + a noun и (to have) the noun1 of a noun2. Both models are seen as modified forms of the scalar and approximating simile respectively. The paper describes mechanisms of this modification and conditions which are necessary for it, and considers the use of formal irony markers (about and all). The paper further analyzes the semantic features of ironic similes in King’s prose, looks into mechanisms of their interpretation and points out a tendency towards thematic specialization of the model (to have) the noun1 of a noun2.

Keywords: ирония, irony, simile, современный английский язык, Contemporary English, Stephen King, ironic simile, образное сравнение, ироническое сравнение, Стивен Кинг