ENGLISH HYPERBOLE IN CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION PROSE (A STUDY OF SOPHIE KINSELLA’S NOVELS)

Abstract

The article presents findings of the ongoing project on the use of hyperbole in contemporary women’s fiction prose, as one of the peculiarities of this genre. The novelty of our study consists in the fact that the genre characteristics and plot devices of romance novels have been abundantly dwelt upon in scholarly researches while the stylistic aspects of the genre have not been explicated enough. The texts constituting the empirical material for the research are the novels “Twenties Girl” and “Can You Keep a Secret?” by Sophie Kinsella, one of the bestselling contemporary English writers. The theoretical background of the research is based on the studies that were carried out by scholars whose field of expertise combines the issues related to literary criticism, context and rhetorical devices. Hyperbole being a typical feature of female writing, and there existing multiple taxonomies of hyperboles, the present study aims at defining peculiarities of the target trope, which is typical of female romance novel. Therefore, the focus in the given study is on the types of hyperbolic expressions, which prevail in the analysed text, i.e. quantitative hyperboles and adjectives-in-the-superlative-degree hyperboles. The research confirms that hyperbole is a context-dependent linguistic phenomenon. The results of the study are reflected in the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the hyperbolic occurrences. The former shows that among hyperboles-numerals, million is most frequently used in the female writing by contrast with the numerals fifty, ten thousand, bazillion, which are least frequently used. Qualitative analysis presents the taxonomy of semantic fields formed by adjectives-in-the-superlative-degree hyperboles (e.g. inanimate objects, behavior, relationships) and displays a high prevalence of occurrences of those from anthropological domain. Moreover, the study demonstrates that the numerical hyperbole’s literal, objective-logical meaning denoting quantity becomes an intensifier and merges with the acquired in the context subjective-evaluative, more expressive meaning, with a positive or negative connotation.