THE USE OF OCCASIONALISMS IN THE BOOK BY S. COLLINS “THE HUNGER GAMES”

Abstract

The article deals with the use of occasionalisms in the trilogy by S. Collins “The Hunger Games”. The saturation of the work with difficult-to-translate linguistic units and the insufficient number of works investigating this relatively new book and its translations determine the relevance of the study. The definition of occasionalism, considered in the papers of domestic and foreign linguists, makes it possible to highlight such a previously unresolved part of the general problem as the peculiarities of the creation and translation of occasionalisms in contemporary English-language fiction. Therefore, the study of these features is the aim of the article. The basis of the article is the method of synchronous description aimed at revealing the semantic and stylistic features of the author’s occasionalisms. Elements of component analysis of lexemes and the transformation method were also used during the research. The translation of a literary text in general, and “The Hunger Games” in particular, is not an easy task, since the genre of fiction implies that a translator has to deal with a stylistically colored vocabulary: occasionalisms, slang, vulgarisms, jargonisms, idioms and diminutives (mockingjay, Catnip, avox, etc.). The occasional word is proven to be a polyfunctional lexical unit. It is stated that the most neologisms in the original text are created by means of stem addition, the author deeply analysing the semantic components of the stems and creating the unique unity of the semantic components and various potential associations. It is established that the translator keeps the strategy of creating a new word, using author neologisms stem addition. The study of occasionalisms is a wide field for scientists, which makes it possible to trace the origin of the word, establish the peculiarities of semantics, characterize the method of its creation, explain the author’s intention and provide possible variants of its translation. The specific vocabulary used in the trilogy “The Hunger Games” greatly contributes to the construction and reproduction of the depicted world, the disclosure of the subject, the author’s intention, and affects the reader.