Language game as a means of stylization of children’s speech (a case study of the novels ‘Room’ by E. Donoghue, ‘All the lost things’ by M. Sacks and ‘Florence and Giles’ by J. Harding)

This article is devoted to the speech of child narrators in novels written for an adult audience. Several studies that consider the speech of child characters note that it is stylized as a child’s with the help of various linguistic means. These include a language game. The article analyzes the use of this technique as a way of stylizing the speech of a child narrator through the example of modern English-language novels Room (Emma Donoghue, 2010), All the Lost Things (Michelle Sacks, 2019), and Florence and Giles (John Harding, 2010). These novels have been chosen because all of them have child narrators, aged 5, 7 and 12 respectively. The analysis shows that a language game can be used both as the main means of stylizing a child’s speech (Florence and Giles) and as a minor one, along with others (Room, All the Lost Things). In the novel Room, the language game manifests itself in the use of conversion, word formation with the help of the suffix -ness, word composition. In All the Lost Things, the language game is mainly represented by word composition. In the novel Florence and Giles, an intentional language game serves as the main means of stylizing a child’s speech. The narrator’s speech is full of occasional expressions formed with the help of conversion, prefixation, suffixation and word composition, reinterpretation of set expressions. An analysis of ontolinguistic studies shows that language game is present in the speech of children. It can be either unintentional, which is associated with situations of cognitive and language deficit, or intentional, which is due to the child’s desire to express themselves in speech. The correlation between the found examples of language game and the real characteristics of children’s speech allows for the conclusion that the depiction of language game is a plausible way of stylizing children’s speech.