The role of key words in a literary text (based on Oscar Wilde’s novel “The picture of Dorian Gray”)

Abstract

The article examines the role of key words in the artistic organization of a literary work on the basis of Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. It has been discovered that the most frequently used lexical units in the text are adjectives with negative evaluative connotations: monstrous, horrible, dreadful, hideous and such like. Among them monstrous stands out as the main key word in spite of the fact that its frequency of occurrence is lower than that of its ‘synonyms’: 25 vs 48, 43, 32 times respectively. In fact, monstrous meets other criteria that seem to be essential in the case of key words. It appears in all significant episodes of the novel; it is characterized by lexical polyphony, great collocational potential, a variety of contextual links and due to the component “morally wrong” in its semantics is connected with the author’s global purport. It is also shown that the ‘intuitive’ linguopoetic analysis of key words can be supported by modern computer programs, like Sketch Engine, which work with text corpora .

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