Emotive Suggestiveness in Contemporary Chinese Fictional Discourse: A Case Study of Yu Hua’s To Live (1992)

Abstract

Introduction. The study examines some theoretical aspects and outlines practical approaches to the analysis of emotive density and its suggestiveness in contemporary Chinese fictional discourse. The work’s shift of attention focus to stylistic emotive attractors and points of structural tension in the text has formed a research interface, and makes it possible to identify some approaches to the analysis of emotive density in contemporary Chinese fictional discourse. Goals. The study aims to determine the functions of emotivity in the language of literary text in terms of ethnocultural specificity and semantic realization through the example of Yu Hua’s To Live (1992). Materials and methods. Theoretically, the work contains traces of integral and suggestive linguistics related to functional syntax and pragmatics, all that to yield an interdisciplinary approach. The artistic agenda of the novel acts as an isolated subjective world model and is viewed as a cognitive set of emotive attractions, the latter’s understanding and perception be determined by personal and social experiences along the axis ‘author–character–reader’. Results. Emotivity and emotional modes of Chinese fictional discourse are characterized by spatial connectivity between structural tension elements, the function of plot-building, individual features inherent to the speakers’ speech portraits, and actual speech effects on the recipient. Becoming a central element of text, emotivity acts as a meta-entity. The systemic stylistic relations of the multi-level linguistic units of the literary text and discourse tend to reflect the general correlation potentials between the functional/semantic fields of emotivity, expressiveness and modality.