‘Why’ questions as a cohesive factor in ‘Waterland’ by G. Swift

The article deals with the problem of relation of two linguistic categories - interrogativity and text cohesion - in a literary text. The aim of the research is to study the role of ‘why’ questions in text cohesion in Waterland by G. Swift. As part of the study, a database of interrogative contexts was formed, which includes general questions, special questions and disjunctive questions. Methods of semantic analysis, stylistic analysis, contextual analysis, syntactical analysis were used in the research process. The paper provides the results of analysis conducted to reveal the functions of ‘why’ questions in text cohesion on the micro-level (lexical and semantical cohesion, syntactical cohesion) and macro-level (plot and composition, imagery, themes and idea) of the literary text. There were found means of text cohesion such as lexical and syntactical repetitions. On the level of lexis, such various types of repetition were discovered as complete lexical repetition, partial repetition, synonymic and antonymic repetition, deixis, repetition of the interrogative adverb ‘why’. On the level of syntax, the analysis demonstrates a tendency to formal incompleteness of interrogative structures, on the one hand, which allows us to assume an implicit type of text cohesion, and, on the other hand, a tendency to formal complexity of interrogative structures, with parenthetic clauses, adverbial participial phrases and homogeneous parts of the sentence being frequently used. Stylistic analysis of ‘why’ questions shows that anaphora, antithesis, syntactical parallelism, parenthesis, ellipsis and aposiopesis are among the means of text cohesion in the text under consideration. The analysis of the novel on the macro-level demonstrates that ‘why’ questions function in the plot development, facilitate semantical cohesion between chapters, form thematical and conceptual unity of the literary text, and serve to promote the unity of imagery. The author concludes that ‘why’ questions facilitate the processes of semantical and syntactical compression, which are considered the main mechanisms of text production.