Lingual expression of story-telling voices in narratives (the case of Vasyl Stefanyk’s novel “A Thread”)

Abstract

The article discusses the necessity of differentiating a number of categories of narrative discourse and the importance of taking into account and clarifying the essence of the category of “story-telling voice” in cases of studying the means of the narrator’s realisation of a particular fiction story. A story-telling voice is understood as a means of the lingual (semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, rhetoric-stylistic) realisation of persons of narrative instances that forms the discourse of the story being told. A novel by the Ukrainian classic writer Vasyl Stefanyk entitled A Thread (1927) is analysed in terms of the lingual means of realisation, interweaving and differentiating the narrative voices of the author and the unknown main heroine. It is emphasised that the linguistic approach to the analysis of the categories of a fictional work is very promising because it allows the researcher to single out types of narrative instances as speaking persons, explicate their points of view, focuses, empathy, and other constituents of the narrative.