Evaluative Adjectives in the Portrayal of Victorian Women

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Published: Jun 15, 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.47743/lincu-2018-1-0115
Keywords:
evaluative adjective positive evaluation negative evaluation women characters Victorian era

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Lyudmyla Gryzhak
Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, Ukraine

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the analysis of evaluative adjectives used in the description of physical appearance, clothing, personal qualities, intelligence and manners of female characters in the English prose fiction of the 19th century. Four novels written by the Victorian writers, approximately in the same time period, served as the source material for the research, namely E. Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” (1847), W. M. Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” (1847), E. Gaskell’s “Cranford” (1851), and C. Dicken’s “Bleak House” (1852). Evaluative adjectives are regarded in this paper as the ones that carry in their use an implication of a positive or negative attitude or evaluation on the part of the writer (beautiful, awful, etc.). They give an emotive or subjective characterization of the qualities of the referent, revealing the writer’s or speaker’s peculiar attitude towards the object described. The present paper has two aims. The first is to study what evaluative adjectives were mostly employed by the authors in the portrayals of women in each of the mentioned novels and whether the authors prefer positive or negative characterisation of female characters. The second one is to examine if there are any gender specific peculiarities in the use of evaluative adjectives in the portrayal of women in the novels.

Article Details

How to Cite
Gryzhak, L. . “Evaluative Adjectives in the Portrayal of Victorian Women”. Linguaculture, vol. 9, no. 1, June 2018, pp. 85-97, doi:10.47743/lincu-2018-1-0115.
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Vol. 9 No. 1 (2018)
Section
Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Lyudmyla Gryzhak, Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, Ukraine

Lyudmyla Gryzhak is an associate professor at the Department of English, Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, Ukraine. Her scientific interests are mostly focused on the functional discourse grammar, text linguistics, and pragmatics. Her publication record includes research papers on portrayal of characters in the English literature, among which Structural Types of Portrait Descriptions in the English Prose Fiction of the XVI Century (in Ukrainian, 2014), Recurrence of Dominant Features in Characters’ Portrait Descriptions (in Ukrainian, 2015), Color Lexemes in Portrait Description of Characters (in Ukrainian, 2016), Emotional-Evaluative Words in the Women’s Portrayal in Dickens’s Novel “Bleak House” (in Ukrainian, 2017) and others.

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