Paronymic attraction as a means of text polycodal decoding

Abstract

The paper deals with the issue of decoding and functional characteristics of such stylistic device as pun or play of words in a literary text, paying special attention to one of its main subdivisions — paronymic attraction. On the extensive linguistic material (more than 600 pages) the most important decoding stylistic functions of this phenomenon (such as evaluative, expressive, characterizing, etc.) have been identifi ed, and the initial hypothesis that paronymic attraction may be closely tied up with all the language system levels, not only phonetic, has been proved. Besides that, the role of communicative, informative and expressive functioning of this stylistic device was established not only in the humouristic literary texts, but in the most serious political discourses as well.

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