Archaization in "Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair" by William Morris

Abstract

The paper considers various means of archaization in fiction at all the language levels: phonetical, morphological, lexical and syntactical. Archaization, or historical styling, is a complex transformation of a language, so it is not limited to archaic words only. The material of the research is a fantasy novel by William Morris "Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair". The novel is a bright example of thorough fiction archaization, as William Morris saw the language as a valuable piece of art itself. In the novel, archaization is relative. Its main function is to adorn the language and take the action to a ‘marvelous past’. The results of the research include the linguistic means of archaization used by William Morris: archaic phonetics is expressed through spelling; archaic lexis includes archaisms and historisms; on morphological and syntactical levels there are old ways of word-building, old paradigm of verbs, archaic grammatical constructions and archaic syntax.