A Stylistic Analysis of Lexicon in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles

Moosavinia, Seyyed Rahim; Shishebor, Elham

doi:10.22055/rals.2017.12921

A Stylistic Analysis of Lexicon in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

Seyyed Rahim Moosavinia

Elham Shishebor

Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz

10.22055/rals.2017.12921

Abstract

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a futuristic, science fiction novel that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans, projecting the United States’ colonial and immigrant past on to a symbolic future. Bradbury’s use of language is mostly picturesque and sensory. The present paper applies a text-oriented analysis of stylistic elements that construct meaning in the text and evoke the novel’s themes, using the analytic model developed by Leech and Short (2007). The study’s focus is on the lexical category—general lexicon, nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs—of chapters that are stylistically representative of Bradbury’s descriptive and metaphorically-rich style.

Keywords

Stylistics

lexical category

Metaphor

Semantics

science fiction