SUMMARY

The present stage of linguistic research is characterized by a great interest towards the problem connected with the study of the text and it’s components.

The present diploma paper is devoted to the comprehensive study of stylistic device – the epithet in the tales of Oscar Wilde.

Done at the junction of linguistic and literary analysis the work is concerned with a number of problems of the text interpretation, stylistic, linguistic and literary analysis.

Despite the fact that there are many works devoted to the problem under analysis some important aspects such as structural – semantic parameters of the text and lexical stylistic device the epithet as its component have not been fully investigated. This defines the actuality of the work and its theoretical value.

The basic purpose of diploma work is formulated as a research of linguistic nature of epithet, its types from the point of semantic, structural parameters and its informational significance in the text.

The given aim predetermines the concrete tasks of the research. The diploma paper pursues the following tasks:

1) to substantiate tasks of text interpretation;

2) to reveal the theoretical notion of the text and its categories;

3) to observe emotional, evaluative, expressive components of the lexical meaning of adjectives;

4) to work out the classification of types of epithet.

The novelty of our work is that the epithet is inspected as the necessary component of the functional whole-text; the investigation of metaphorical epithet, from the position of intentional and implicational components of meaning.

From the theoretical point of view this work presents the comprehensive study of epithet that makes it possible to reveal its linguo-stylistic and functional features.

The research of structural characteristics of epithet and revealing its role in text formation makes the certain contribution to a further work in linguistic text.

The practical value of the work lies in the fact that the results of the investigation can be used in the courses of lectures in stylistics, seminars in style and text interpretation and also can be useful for practical courses of English language.

The tails by Oscar Wailed were used as linguistic material for our research.

In this work there were used the following methods of linguistic analysis: word’s definitions analysis, contextual-situative and text analysis for revealing the informational value of epithet.

The work consists of introduction, two chapters, a conclusion, a summary and the reference list of the works used.

The first chapter deals with the theoretical notions of the text and its categories, substantiation of the tasks of text interpretation. As a result of the study of these problems we can come to the conclusion that text interpretation resting on the junction of stylistics and text linguistics is aimed at extracting, aesthetic and meaningful, emotional information from the literary text.

The second chapter is concerned with the semantic and stylistic analysis of the epithet. In the work the epithet is determined as a stylistic device based on the interplay of emotive and logical meaning in a attributive word, phrase or even sentence used to characterize an object and pointing out to the reader. The epithet always has the emotional meaning or emotional color due to peculiarities of semantic structure of adjectives.

For the purpose of study of linguistic nature of epithet we dwell on the problem of lexical and stylistic meaning of adjectives.

The use of adjectives as epithet as preconditioned by the contact and functional characteristics that is predicativeness, stylistic churdge and liability for stylistic actualization in the context.

Next undertake the study the types of epithet and its informational meaning in the text.

We suggested the following classification of the epithet: conventional or standing; explanatory, metaphorical, mixed and syntactical types of epithet (invertational and phrase).

Under the conventional epithet we understand the firm combinations, which point out the property of the subject.

The explanatory epithet points out the main feature of the word.

The metaphorical epithet is treated as a sort of explicit metaphor.

In the work there were described 2 types of the metaphorical epithet: intersional and implicational.