Linguistic representation of the game component of the children’s worldview in the novels “All the Lost Things” by M. Sacks and “Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha” by R. Doyle

The purpose of the study is to identify linguistic ways of describing a child’s play activity. The analysis is based on the material of the English-language novels “All the Lost Things” by M. Sacks and “Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha” by R. Doyle, in which the narrative is conducted in the first person. In the course of the work, the episodes containing descriptions of children’s games were analyzed, the linguistic units used by the authors to describe the gameplay were identified, their classification and quantitative analysis were presented. In this study, the game is considered as a separate component of the child’s worldview and for the first time the ways of its representation by linguistic elements of different levels are comprehensively analyzed. The obtained data on the linguistic markers used in the framework of the works under consideration constitute the scientific novelty of this work. As a result, it was found that lexical and grammatical means can equally be used for a realistic representation of the game. Stylistic techniques, in turn, reflect the perception of the process by the narrator child. At the same time, the personality of the narrator and the author’s idea determine by what means and how much detail the game will be presented in the text.