Dominant vocabulary in writer’s lexicography

Abstract

The article demonstrates that one of the instruments of the embodiment of the author’s message in a work of art is the writer’s vocabulary in its part which shows the rise of frequency as compared to linguistic frequency of the same words fixed in frequency registers of special dictionaries. This part of the writer’s vocabulary is termed the writer’s dominant vocabulary and is studied on the basis of the works of Iris Murdoch. The article shows that the dominant vocabulary breaks up into a number of semantic fields whose constituents are characterized by semantic attraction and interdependence in definitions of the field elements. Most frequent words of concrete semantics show a pronounced tendency of becoming symbols.