Keyword: «paradox»

The article deals with the characteristic features of S. Meyer’s artistic manner in her bestseller “The Host”. The novelist’s stylistic devices are viewed within the context of her imagery and themes. The writer comes to the conclusion that the novel under analysis abounds with tropes showing high expressive potential. The reader’s background knowledge must be involved the process of interpretation. Frequent use of stylistic devices based upon logical opposition typical of oratorical and belles-lettres function styles accounts for the success of the anti-utopia.

The article deals with stylistic ways of creating the image of the atypical reasoner Alfred Doolittle in the classical work by B. Shaw. The playwright’s imagery is viewed within the context of socialist and feministic ideas advocated in the play. The author comes to the conclusion that Doolittle’s characterization is based upon an ample use of lexical, syntactic and phonetic devices indicative of oratorical style.

The article is devoted to evaluating the role of paradox and its realization mechanisms in Lord Henry’s speech within the context of central themes raised in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. The author analyzes the paradoxical judgments and aphorisms of one of the main characters, reflecting the novelist’s philo-sophical ideas of a social, cultural and ideological nature. The scientific paper claims that Wilde’s paradoxical thinking is revealed in the speech characteristics of the personage.

This article examines the phenomenon of linguistic conflict, represented through a system of antonymic relations in Russian aphorisms. An aphorism is understood as a concise, complete statement with significant philosophical or pragmatic potential. Antonymy, being one of the fundamental semantic relations of language, goes beyond simple opposition in the space of aphorism, becoming a tool for explicating the deep contradictions of human existence, thinking and society. The article analyzes the types of antonymic oppositions (contrarian, complementary, converse, vector) used in aphoristics and identifies their specific functions: the creation of an antithesis as a rhetorical device, the actualization of paradox, irony, the formation of value judgments and didactic attitudes. The research material is a corpus of Russian aphorisms and catchphrases of the XVIII–XXI centuries.