Holophrastic Constructions in English and French Fiction

Abstract

Holophrasis is an occasional type of lexical and syntactic method of word formation in which a syntactic unit is transformed into a lexical one. Holophrastic constructions (HCs) are a productive method of occasional word formation in English and French writing. HCs are typically used to enhance expressiveness, conciseness, and accuracy in writing. In this study, we examined HCs in the language of modern English and French writers in terms of their syntactic structure, semantics, graphical representation, and functions. To achieve this goal, methods of induction and deduction, word-forming analysis and linguistic definition have been used. Holophrastic constructions, collected by a continuous sample of works of French and English-language fiction, have become the research material. We found that the HCs in our texts consisted of between two and twenty-six components, suggesting a high ceiling on the number of units that can be combined to make a HC. While most of the HCs in the texts were semantically transparent, there were several semantically opaque examples that required additional cultural and intertextual knowledge to decode. The HCs in both English and French were represented visually in several ways: hyphens, italics, capitalisation, and the combination of these methods. The article has presented nominative and attributive HCs with different stylistic loads. Nominative HCs refer to certain concepts and phenomena of reality, giving them greater expressiveness and originality. Attributive HCs are formed to express the quality of an object using lexical, semantic and morphological means. HCs in our texts served various functions: nominative, descriptive, pragmatic, and as a way to compress content. The cоnteхt of hоlоphrаstic construction use is usually limited by the sentence in which it is used. The emphatic nature, vivid expressiveness, self-contextualisation and ability to conserve linguistic efforts are distinguishing features of HCs.