Paragraphemic Means in Construing Author’s Gender Identity

Abstract

Introduction. One of the tasks of modern gender linguistics is to reveal non-verbalmeans that help to construe gender distinctions of the character and the image of the authoras well. Studying the critical literature concerning such aspects as the image of the author,implied author, author and narrator proved the actuality of the subject of the given investigation.Critical works’ analysis showed that this facet has not been studied well, there are still a lot ofgaps, as for instance, non-verbal means of author’s image construing. Purpose. The paper aimsto reveal paragraphemic means used by the women writers in French autobiographical novelsand suggest narrative and pragmatic facet of author’s gender identity construing in Frenchautobiographical novels written by women writers. Methods. To define the functions ofparagraphemic means in author’s gender identity construing the investigation is methodologicallygrounded on narrative, pragmatic and stylistic analysis. Results: The paper singles out andclassifies the group of paragraphemic means which help to construe author’s gender identityin French autobiographical novel written by women-writers. Dominant place among such meansbelongs to the pictures breaking the narrative of the novel, the size of narrative, italic meansof accentuating the author’s intention and numbering the abstracts. Conclusion. Paragraphemicsis applied facet in linguistics that studies graphical text organization and the functions of nonverbal means in revealing the author’s intentions. Being restricted in their proper meaningsnon-verbal means bound semantic variety of phrase or supra-phrasal units. They introducesome information in that way as it is supposed to be decoded by the reader. Non-verbal meanshelp to make the image of the author and construe his/her gender identity.