International Journal of Philology

The paper outlines the current narratological approach to the category of subject and its discoursal realization in the form of subjectivity. It states a strong interconnection between the real life narrativization and fictional narrative. Resulting from the dialogical nature of “self” the indexes of subjectivity have been traced through a three-level Peircian sign model. The results provided us with the reasons to suppose that deictic centers have a binary correlation with the emergence of subjectivity in the narrative, which partly coincides with the narrative identity phenomenon viewed from the post-classical paradigm of meaning-making. The aim of the research is to highlight and fix linguistic ways of subjectivity emergence in narrative discourse of the XIX century English novel. Analytic and empirical stylistics methods have been used in combination with the structural and semiotic approach of Charles Peirce to follow the spaces of subjectivity arousal in the novels. The primary methodology of research was based on the principles of hermeneutic and phenomenological interpretation of the narrative discourse. Results of the research. To reach paper’s aim a corpus of free-access digitalized novels of the XIX century has been compiled, taken from Gutenberg Project, The Corpus of the Canon of Western Literature and Common Library 0.1. Victorian Fiction Corpus and have been processed with Atlas.ti.8 statistic tool. General token number is 19,287, 528 words. These data was used for the preliminary semantic and thematic analysis of the novels in regards to frequency of keywords and their distribution. Primary semantic screening of the narrative fragments in the XIX century English novels singled out the frequency of the keywords occurrence, and the highest lemma frequency. It displayed a high frequency of positive experience lemmas ‘love’, ‘life’, ‘great’, ‘God’, ‘feel’ etc. signaling about anthropogenic nature of the semantics in the novel. This outcome was consonant with the previous corpus stylistics findings, reflecting an active subject of the ХІХ century novel. Another finding of the research concludes a strong interdependence between the position of deictic markers of subjectivity (personal and possessive pronouns) and the emergent subjectivity in narrative discourse. In post-position to the descriptive fragments in the paragraphs, deictic markers perform a framing function to the storyline. Consequently, a combinability of the personal pronoun with the verbs (N+Verb pattern) within one thematic group, allows for significant textual compression to the level of predicative constructions, which reflect the topic of the paragraph. Moving from the level of firstness, represented by semantic analysis, to the level of interpretation (the level of secondness) provides a phenomenological account for the signs, bearing the meaning of physical activity of the human body. The reason why body language plays such an important role in the corpus lies in the effective narrative technique to represent emotions and actions through visual and kinesthetic modes. It requires frequent author’s references to the elaborated character descriptions through their movements, actions, appearance to help the reader create a normative cognitive representation. Semiotic signs serve here as mediators of the cultural and social beliefs and values, reflecting the personal subjective interpretation of the world as enactive semiotic modeling

deictic center; narrative identity; post-classical narratology; indexes; semiotic modeling; firstness; secondness; interpretant