The main characteristics of Stephen King’s idiostyle

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the characteristics of S. King’s idiostyle. Despite the fact that the phenomenon of idiostyle is studied for a long time, the interest in it does not run

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low, but also grows. The concept of idiostyle, metaphor, and simile as a trope has a long history. Both Russian and foreign linguists have common views to the phenomenon of simile – simile is assumed like the structure which unites two different concepts in one image, it is explicit comparison. Metaphor is always implicit comparison. More specifically, this investigation attempts to find out frequent semantic and structural types of similes and metaphors in S. King’s novels and their functions in the text. These similes and metaphors were identified, retrieved from S. King’s novels, and analyzed according to typologies used. Results indicate that there is a possibility of introducing semantic and structural types of mentioned tropes. The most widely used types of simile are similes with horror lexemes and two-term nominative similes. Among metaphors there are a lot of metaphors with horror lexemes and simple metaphors with only one image. The majority of tropes with horror lexemes indicates the genre of novels, which is horror. The study calls on teachers to take these findings into account when teaching metaphors within the framework of stylistics.