On the issue of the substantives’ features characterizing the person in M. Houellebecq`s novel-essay “Expansion of the Space of Struggle”

The subject of study of this article is the substantives, which represent the name of a person in the novel-essay by M. Houellebecq “Expansion of the Space of Struggle.” The work examines the word formation and stylistic originality of the substantives that characterize both the appearance of the characters and their material and spiritual life, professional activities and social status, racial-ethnic differences and other features. The substantives have been divided into groups and lexical-thematic classes, based on their derivational peculiarities. The main focus is on morphological word formation, in which the base of the word is modified using various formal means. The substantives, denoting names of individuals, are chosen as the subject of our study due to the growing interest in humans as a system that reflects various aspects of their existence. Thanks to substantives, one can vividly and emotionally describe a person. A significant number of lexemes in the analyzed work that characterize a person’s appearance have a negative connotation, which is due to the writer’s desire to give his characters a negative description. The suffixes of subjective evaluation are widely used by the author and add the appropriate color to the lexemes. The results of the study may prove useful in examining the features of M. Houellebecq’s literary language and in the linguistic analysis of his works.