Literary Vocabulary of Charlotte Bingham’s Novels: Stylistic and Functional Aspects

The study focuses on the question of how literary vocabulary in Charlotte Bingham’s novels performs stylistic and functional roles in the structure of the literary text. The aim of the work was to identify and classify literary lexical units, determine their stylistic and functional colorings, and analyze their influence on the overall stylistics of the works. The main material was a corpus of 10 novels with a volume of 5125 pages. The methodology included a continuous sample for selecting novels. In addition, the stylistic classification according to Morohovsky et al. and the functional classification according to Brandes were used. The results show that Bingham’s works present all types of literary vocabulary according to Morohovsky et al., which have a national, social, temporal, or professional coloring; neologisms are an exception. Functional colorings directly determined the stylistic functions of vocabulary in Bingham’s prose. Further research should be directed at analyzing the colloquial vocabulary of her works, comparing literary and colloquial vocabulary within one work, identifying the connection between the choice of vocabulary and genre-thematic features, as well as studying the dynamics of the lexical composition in the author’s work during different stages of her career. Such approaches will allow creating a more complete picture of the writer’s individual style and a deeper understanding of the patterns of functioning of her linguistic means.