Syntactic Dynamics as a Means of Representing Psychologism in A. P. Chekhov's Prose (Based on the Story "The Lady with the Dog")

Abstract

The article studies the syntactic organisation of a literary text as a means of expressing psychologism in the prose of A. P. Chekhov. The material of the study is the story "The Lady with the Dog". The research methods were quantitative syntactic analysis and structural-semantic and cognitive approaches, based on the initial, culminating and final stages of the work. It is established that the psychological state of the characters correlates with the syntactic dynamics of the text: in situations of psychological crisis there is a tendency towards syntactic simplification of speech, whereas the emotional development of the characters is accompanied by increasing complexity of syntactic constructions. The results obtained broaden understanding of the linguistic mechanisms of forming literary psychologism.