IDIOMATICITY OF THE WRITER’S INDIVIDUAL STYLE: A STUDY OF AUTHORS FROM THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19th CENTURY

The study of the idiomaticity of an author’s style is one of the most important tasks in the linguistic analysis of literary texts. Various individual strategies are possible when using idioms, reflecting the specific features of an idiolect. Firstly, here we deal with authorial preferences in the use of idioms in general. Secondly, individuality in using idiomatic expressions is also evident in the choice of idioms from a semantic field containing closely related idioms. This article examines the individual use of idioms from the semantic field of ‘death’ by 17 signifi cant writers from the second half of the 19th century, including A. T. Averchenko, I. A. Bunin, I. A. Goncharov, Maxim Gorky, F. M. Dostoevsky, V. G. Korolenko, A. I. Kuprin, N. S. Leskov, D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak, P. I. Melnikov-Pechersky, D. S. Merezhkovsky, A. N. Ostrovsky, A. F. Pisemsky, M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, L. N. Tolstoy, I. S. Turgenev, and A. P. Chekhov. The texts of these authors, included in the main subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus (RNC), serve as the material for the study. The research reveals that the use of idioms from the semantic field of ‘death’ is highly individualized and is determined by the author’s style. The use of idioms in the speech of native speakers, including renowned writers, is dependent on time or other factors governing the functioning of the language system to a certain extent. However individual discursive practices are far more important. Even variations in the form of the same idiom seem to be purely individual characteristics. The article discusses some linguistic and extralinguistic factors that infl uence the frequency distribution of idioms.