Linguistic analysis of the new vocabulary in Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange"

Linguistic analysis of the new vocabulary in Anthony Burgess´
"A Clockwork Orange"

by

 Sandra Beyer

Table Of Contents

1. Introduction Page 1

2. Phonetics Page 2

3. Syntax  Page 3

4. Coherence Page 6

5. Morphology  Page 7

6. Semantics  Page 8

7. About the narrator Page 9

8. Conclusion  Page 10

9. Bibliography Page 11

1. Introduction

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the present extract from Anthony Burgess´ "A Clockwork Orange" is its language. Alex, the writer of the book, uses a great number of unusual words that seem to be freely invented by the author. By having a closer look at them, it can be noted that many of them have their origin in the Russian language.

In this essay I will survey these unusual words and try to expose if they are phonetically, morphologically, syntactically or semantically different from "real" English words or if they could be called Anglicism according to one of the above topics. Therefore I am going to try to give a phonetic transcription of some of the new words and their corresponding Russian expressions and compare them.

Then I am going to have a closer look at the word order of the present extract and try to put the new words into their corresponding syntactical categories. I will as well show how the sentences are connected and what lexical or grammatical properties make the extract coherent.

In addition I am going to specify some of the Anglicism in the text and intend to explain how they are built .I also will try to make clear the thematic roles of one example sentence to facilitate its interpretation. Finally I am going to present what in my opinion could be said about the author′s background and education, according to the text.

2. Phonetics

1.horrorshow - “khorosho”¹

Looking at the transliteration of the Russian word “khorosho” (good, well) the following pronunciation can be deduced: “kh” has to be pronounced as “h in house”, “r” as “rolled r in roll”, “sh” as “sh in shut” and “o” as “o in folk”².

[...]

1 „Nadsat Translation Guide“: http://www.jake.chem.unsw.edu.au/-michaels/Orange/nadsat.html

2 „The Russian Alphabet“: http://www.geocities.com/colosseum/Track/7635/alphabet.html