Words expressing positive human emotions in The adventures of Huckleberry Finn novel by Mark Twain’s

Бюллетень науки и практики / Bulletin of Science and Practice

Researchers traditionally link the origins of Mark Twain’s work with the traditions of folklore of the American frontier and the European and American Enlightenment. This ideology successfully took root on American soil, as it corresponded to the worldview of the first settlers in the New World, who sought to create a new society based on the principles of freedom, democracy, simplicity and naturalness.

The aspiration of American settlers to build their lives according to new, more natural laws was ideologically the embodiment of the idea of the natural man of the French enlighteners. In addition, this aspiration was the origin of the formation of the main plot of American literature of the 19th century, which included several motifs and images: firstly, it is an escape from civilization to nature, which is refracted through the images of childhood, and secondly, it is the confrontation, and sometimes the battle of the hero with the whole world [1].

Literary activity of Mark Twain is associated with realism, it is generally accepted that he is the founder of realism in the United States. However, the American writer in his major works only once turned to the direct depiction of contemporary reality ("The Gilded Age"), because Twain as a realist writer saw his goal not in the analysis of the social system, but in the comprehension and affirmation of the original essence of man, which is reflected primarily in the approach to nature, and thus he was much closer to Swift, Defoe or Fielding than to the European realists of the XIX century [2].

So in the novel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" Twain turns to the memories of childhood - the period before the Civil War, when the mores of the American people were still simple, and the worldview of Americans has not yet been completely absorbed by the idea of material enrichment in any way.

The main characters of the novel - Huck Finn and Negro Jim are characterized by a naive, natural, holistic worldview, they appear on the pages of the novel as they were created by nature, God. It was characteristic of the American consciousness to comprehend its national path with the help of biblical images in the spirit of Puritan tradition. For U.S. citizens, the desire for innocence and naiveté, for naturalness and simplicity, and at the same time the feeling of their own exclusivity, superiority and opposition to the rest of the world, was embodied in the Old Testament mythology of the first man on Earth. In the text of Twain's work, this mythologeme is embodied in the image of Gek. The author shows what man is in essence, separated from everything artificial and superficial, which hides his true nature and essence [3].

The problem of describing lexical emotionality in Mark Twain's novel is undeniably of genuine interest. In this article we will consider the main provisions of the theory of emotionality of linguistic units, with the help of which we will try to describe by what linguistic means Mark Twain expresses positive emotions in his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The emotive meaning of a word does not reflect the emotion of only a given speaker but is a reflection of a generalized social emotion and serves to express the emotional evaluativeness of the objects of the world through the emotional type of speech patterns. Classification of emotive vocabulary, distinguishes three types of emotives: 1. emotional words — affectives, ambiguous words in the function of emotional exclamations, used as emotional interjections; 2. words and expressions with emotional meaning - words that not only express the emotional states of the speaker, but also have a nominative function, naming the experienced emotion; 3. words with an emotional component of meaning, which name the given subject, while expressing the attitude of the speaker to it [4].

Mark Twain's novel "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is an exciting book describing the story of a boy and his friend Jim. Huckleberry Finn, who is the protagonist of this story, is a young boy who is in full enjoyment of his immature life. His daily thrills include pranks, adventures, and running away from society. At first glance, it might seem that Huckleberry Finn is an uneducated boy who has no interest in or likelihood of becoming a mature adult. However, in the course of the story, the immature boy has many encounters that strengthen his character and lead him from being a boy to being a man.

We analyzed following words, expressing positive emotions: 1. Dey’s two angels hoverin’ roun’ ‘bout him; 2. Pap warn’t in a good humor — so he was his natural self. 3. Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. 4. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine. 5. I went up and set down on a log at the head of the island and looked out on the big river and the black driftwood and away over to the town, three mile away, where there was three or four lights twinkling. 6. The sun was up so high when I waked that I judged it was after eight o’clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about things and feeling rested and rather comfortable and satisfied. 7. I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them. 8. A couple of squirrels set on a limb and jabbered at me very friendly . 9. Then when we had got pretty well stuffed , we laid off and lazied [5].

The language of emotions has infinite possibilities for conveying the subtlest shades of feelings, for evaluating what is happening through sensory experience, for influencing the addressee of the message and for self-expression. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a human speech devoid of emotional and sensual component, regardless of what culture and language it is a native speaker. The high coefficient of the emotional component in the linguistic canvas of the cultural picture of the world of any nation is evidenced, in particular, by the data of explanatory dictionaries, whose pages abound with emotionally colored vocabulary. It should be noted that, as the observations of psychologists and sociolinguists show, positive human emotions are represented in the language to a much lesser extent than negative ones. This can be explained not so much by the fact that a person experiences negative emotions more fully and more often than positive ones, but by the fact that negative emotions much more often causally affect both the communication process itself and their linguistic explication in the process of speech communication. Speaking about the specifics of the representation of positive emotions in language, it is necessary to keep in mind that the emotion of happiness, which is considered "prototypical", or, in other words, the "best representative" of positive emotions, has a complex, ambiguous nature. While most emotions are reactions to certain events, the concept of happiness in Russian most often implies an assessment of life in general or such important aspects of it as personal life and work. At the same time, the English lexeme happiness is used to denote both happiness in the global sense and "small" happiness or joy. For example: you gwyne to have considable trouble in yo’ life, en considable joy [5].

Interest in the language of emotions has characterized linguistic research for quite a long time. Today, there is no doubt not only about the importance of studying the emotive component in the language of communication, but also about the fact of the close connection between the emotional and the rational, since all emotions, with few exceptions, involve evaluation. This fact testifies to the close connection of the emotional component with reflexive processes, namely, with the procedure of comparison, which inevitably accompanies the speech-thought behavior of a linguistic personality [6]. Lexical-semantic analysis, included in the framework of cognitive-discursive research, is currently one of the most demanded linguistic methods and contributes to the comprehensive study of the emotive function of language. Such developments are carried out on the basis of studying simple, elementary contexts of life situations at the word and sentence level, both in texts of artistic communication and in other functional genres. The variability of such a broad approach is not accidental and is explained by the regularities of the formation of the whole linguistic science and the corresponding transformation of the object of its scientific claims.