Emphatic discourse markers in English renaissance literature (on the material of the book by Thomas More’s “Utopia”)

Abstract

The research aims to study emphatic discourse markers (DM) in English Renaissance fiction literature. The paper comprises the materials obtained during the analysis of the book «Utopia» by Thomas More. The paper provides valuable insights on the concept of emphatic DM, gives examples of the representation of the emotive content of the fictional text by means of emphatic DM, compares the functional features of emphatic DM and their frequency in the English and Russian versions of the book. We have used AntConc program allowing to search and count various elements of the text, as well as a comparative analysis of parallel fictional texts. The results of the study demonstrate that strategies for achieving emotional speech by highlighting the meaningfully important part of the utterance in T. More’s book «Utopia» involve various linguistic means, including emphatic DM. This article provides contextual illustrations of the fact that emphasis in English fiction discourse is associated with the categories of intensity, evaluation and expressivity. The cases when emphatic DM express subjective modality are described. It is noted that the range of emphatic DM in the Russian text is more diverse, and the occurrence is higher. As a result of the analysis of emphatic DM in «Utopia» both in English and in Russian the paper reveals their correspondence patterns. The most frequent of them are the ones when the emphatic DM of one formal semantic group are used and when there is no emphatic DM in the English text, but it is used in the Russian text. The paper outlines the further research areas of emphatic DM connected with a comparative analysis of their use in English fiction during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to identify the features of their functioning indiachrony.