The Main Characteristics of Stephen King’s Idiostyle

Abstract

The paper presents stylistic value of simile and metaphor as the major features of Stephen King's idiostyle. The linguistic analysis of some novels (1408, Carrie, The Shining, Dreamcatcher, Dead Zone) is aimed at discovering sematic and structural types of simile and metaphor, revealing their functions in the content development. Structural analysis of simile and metaphor constituency in the above mentioned novels resulted in allocating some formal patterns: a one-term verbal simile (as if ... verb, verb ... like ... verb), a two-term attribute simile (noun-like), a two-term or three-term nominative simile, and simple (a one-image) or expanded pattern of metaphor. The sematic analysis of Stephen King's novels lets reveal the compound character of simile and metaphor use. Both tropes are used predominantly to create tension in narration that is often raised up to the atmosphere of horror, the latest is considered by the researchers to be a major feature of the idiostyle of the author under study. Having described some semantic ways of expanding horror, death, savageness, mood and expressiveness with similes and metaphors, the researchers concluded that these tropes perform leading functions in personalizing Stephen King's idiostyle: constructing images and describing feelings that characters are going into along with creating the tone of tension and horror; performing common stylistic function despite the fact that they differ in the way the atmosphere of tension and horror is built: explicit realization in simile and implicit by various types of morphemes in metaphor.

Keywords

• English language
• simile
• metaphor
• semantic types of metaphor
• structural types of metaphor
• semantic types of simile
• structural types of simile
• Stephen King