VERBS AS MARKERS OF THE REPRESENTATION OF FREE-INDIRECT SPEECH IN THE STRUCTURE OF A NARRATIVE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the verb as representing component in the structure of free-indirect speech on the material of women's prose of the first half of the 20th century. In the very research it was determined that verbs convey the author's attitude to the character, help readers immerse themselves in the world of the hero, act on his emotions and perceive the described events. Our research employs comparative and oppositional methods. The first helped to reveal the peculiarities, similarities and differences of the verbal behavior of a female character vs a male character and their functions at the lexical level; the second was used to identify inner free-indirect speech, to identify differential features of male vs female free-indirect speech, to establish systemic connections between both of them, to classify "male" vs "female" type of communication. It has been noted that one of the forms of free-indirect speech actualization are representative verbs that indicate the gender of differential parameters of male and female free-indirect speech, serve as a means of removing the character's perspective, and are a signal of characters’ excitement, their feelings and perceptions. The phenomenon of representative component is analyzed in two aspects: in terms of semantics and its position in the text in the structure of masculine and feminine free-indirect speech. Its distribution in free-indirect speech proves that interposition prevails, while preposition and postposition occur more than twice as often in the analyzed pieces of work. There are several groups of verbs that introduce free-direct speech into the context such as: verbs of thought, verbs of speech, verbs of feelings, verbs of questions/ answers. The analysis of the semantics of masculine and feminine free-indirect speech includes 4 groups of verbs, with a wide range of synonyms, which indicate the thoughts, internal impulses of the character's psyche, convey excitement and feelings, reproduce the characters' internal reflections. It was observed that the variety of ways of introducing freeindirect speech is explained by the fact that it is an organic combination of the positions of the author and the character.