Lexical and Functional Peculiarities of Utterances Expressing Surprise in English and Ukrainian Female Prose at the Beginning of the 21st Century.

Abstract

The Master’s research paper aims at outlining lexical and functional peculiarities of utterances expressing surprise in English and Ukrainian female prose at the beginning of the 21st century. Their defining gender characteristics are also established.
The empirical data for the research paper was collected through a complete sampling method from contemporary English prose written by women, namely, from novels ‘Small Island’ by Andrea Levy, ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ by Lionel Shriver, ‘Pizza Gimalai’ by Irena Karpa, ‘The Land of All Those Lost, or Creepy Little Tales’ by Kateryna Kalytko. The sample size comprises 806 utterances.
The results of the lexical and semantic analysis are summarized in charts representing a percentage ratio between various means of expressing surprise (including phonetic, semantic, and syntactic levels). Closer inspection of lexical level reveals that the percentage ratio of lexical means is neither homogeneous within the contrastive analysis between two languages, nor within one given language.
Another important research finding suggests that the gender aspect of utterances expressing surprise (e.g. whether a woman expresses her surprise to a man or vice versa, or a man describes a woman’s surprise, etc.) is usually determined by the peculiarities of a selected novel, namely, by a narration type, the protagonist’s sex, the narrator’s sex, etc.
The current study has also found that utterances expressing surprise that involve judgment or rumination components are more typical of both contemporary English and Ukrainian female prose than utterances that involve a reactive component only.