EXPRESSIVE MEANS IN PLAUTUS:’ COMEDY “THE POT OF GOLD”

Abstract

The article studies expressive means used in the works of the Roman comedian Plautus: and defines their specificity in terms of their communicative effect. It substantiates the regularities of expressiveness actualized in a literary text, where the manifestation of the author’s subjective feelings reflects the individual world picture of native speakers. Expressiveness enhances the emotional colouring of the character’s speech, highlights important moments of the text content, thereby activating the reader’s or viewer’s attention and projecting the text main idea. Based on the analysis of the Latin text of the most famous comedy “Aulularia” (“The pot of Gold”), the article demonstrates its utterances’ expressive potential as well as outlines the author’s ability to influence the viewers, who were frequent theatre visitors and Plautus:’ talent admirers. It was defined that the lexical expressive means were largely influenced by the author’s desire to make his text closer to the everyday “street” language (the use of archaisms), to enhance the effectiveness of the depicted scenes through the collision of different languages (the use of Greek lexical units), to emphasize the subjective evaluation and express emotional state (the use of diminutives). It was found out that the enhancement of the text expressiveness is achieved by personal pronouns, which boost the comic effect, serve to create witty situations, attract the reader/viewer to empathize with the characters, as well as due to the various ways of the language play (e.g. assonance, alliteration, gemination, repetitions), which highlight definite traits of characters of the depicted personages. The text grammatical organization is also distinguished by its emotional expression by using short simple sentences, imperative and interrogative types of utterances, that produce the dynamism of the dialogue flow, add a vivid national colouring to the text, and serve to create rapid changes in the stage atmosphere. The expressive stylistic means are represented by interjections (conveying the speaker’s emotional and mental state, their attitude to reality) as well as the fixed formulas of appeal to the gods, that used to play an important role in the life of the Romans, while in a specific case of the analyzed text were supposed to help attract luck and punish the guilty ones. The article summarizes that the use of expressive means is highly conditioned by the text genre and its pragmatic orientation and by the author’s desire to influence the audience and activate its imagination.