Personification in the Speech of a Child Narrator (a Case Study of Novels ‘Room’ by E. Donoghue and ‘All the Lost Things’ by M. Sacks)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17072/2073-6681-2021-4-89-99Keywords:
child’s speech; metaphor; anthropocentrism; personification.Abstract
The article examines personification in the speech of a child narrator. Along with other grammatical and lexical features of a child’s speech, the use of personification by children is distinguished. Personification in a child’s speech, as well as in human speech, can be explained by metaphorical nature of human thinking as well as anthropocentrism of human thinking and speech. Personification can be a characteristic of the speech of a child narrator in fiction intended for adult readership. It is worth noticing that the use of a child narrator as a device is not new in literature. In the course of research, we conducted an analysis of two modern novels written in English: Room by Emma Donoghue (2010) and All the Lost Things by Michelle Sacks (2019). The two novels tell the reader about a traumatic experience that happened to the children or their significant others. The novels discuss the topics of abuse (physical and psychological), abduction, isolation, lying and memory. The narrators in the chosen novels are children of preschool and primary school age (5 and 7 years old). The analysis of the narrators’ speech allowed us to find numerous examples of personification, expressed by different parts of speech. All the found examples can be divided into groups according to the object of personification: household items and objects of the world, parts of the human body, animals, abstract notions, plants, and inorganic nature. The analysis showed that personification as a characteristic of speech can fulfill several functions: make the narrator more plausible, express the narrator’s emotions, communicate the reader the information that is crucial for the understanding of the plot.References
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Caracciolo M. Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue’s Room. Semiotica. 2014, vol. 202, pp. 183–205. (In Eng.)
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Hatano G., Inagaki K. Young children's spontaneous personification as analogy. Child Development. 1987, vol. 58, issue 4, pp. 1013–1020. (In Eng.)
Hurst M. J. The Voice of the Child in American Literature. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1990. 185 p. (In Eng.)
O’Grady W. How Children Learn Language. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005. 240 p. (In Eng.)
Rubik M. Out of the dungeon, into the world: Aspects of the prison novel in Emma Donoghue’s Room. How to Do Things with Narrative: Cognitive and Diachronic Perspectives. Ed. by Jan Alber and Greta Olson. Berlin, Boston, De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 219–240. (In Eng.)
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