LEXICAL AND STYLISTIC RESOURCES OF SOCIOCULTURAL DOMINANT’S VERBALIZATION BY THE PARAMETER “POWER DISTANCE” (A CASE STUDY OF G. CHEVALIER’S NOVEL “CLOCHEMERLE”)

Abstract

The present article deals with the problem of sociocultural dominants’ verbalization within the literary text. As the material for such study the novel “Clochemerle” by G. Chevalier, the French writer of the first third of 20th century, was chosen. Contemporary science has numerous points of view on the analysis of individual or / and group values. Nevertheless, such study hold by linguistics should be enhanced by the data of other scientific approaches e.g. sociology, cultural studies, cognitive science etc. Currently one of the most broad-scale research of human values is the one of G. Hofstede. Its results are presented for more than 100 countries all over the world. As any language represents the system that is able to conserve and transmit knowledge, the major values, sociocultural dominants, are inevitably reflected by the language. Among the parameters pointed out by the scientist, the parameter “power distance” was chosen for this research. The parameter “power distance” is identified as following: all the representatives of the community are unequal, and this parameter shows how this inequality is taken on the society. According to the Hofstede’s research, France is the country with clearly defined distance between the leader and subordinate. Situations when the leader takes a decision without discussing it with his / her subordinates can be observed on the G. Chevalier’s novel “Clochemerle”. As the analyzed novel is often perceived as a regional one, it should be noticed that the conception of power perception in it is closely connected to the philosophy of regionalism as a social and cultural movement and the idea of power perception in it. The topic of power and distance between the leader and subordinate is widely developed in the novel around the characters of the mayor and the baroness as two leaders and local teacher and the parish priest as subordinates. The novel’s linguistic analysis shows that the leaders tend to treat their subordinates haughtily, to use them for their own goals and ambitions, whereas the subordinates manifest extreme respect. The “power distance” parameter of sociocultural dominant is verbalized by the means of lexical units to describe haughtiness, individual comparisons, opposition of positively and negatively connotated words and phrases in characters’ description, realization of basic space opposition “up / down”.