The Semantics Ofnadsat. A Study on Language and Its Functions in Defining Character – A Clockworkorange by Anthony Burgess

Abstract

Having on its background the topic of youth culture and its language, social disorder and its criticism, the general disruption in society and the pitfalls of social and technological progress in the age of modernism, the present article critically looks at Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) with a view to analysing character, language and its functions. After a brief introduction to the context of the book’s publication, its genre, and some general remarks on the novelty of the language created in the novel, the article progresses to the presentation of the major sources of this language. The central part of the paper originally approaches Nadsat from a semantic perspective with the aim of testing and validating the functions of Nadsat already identified and further investigating (individual and group) character portrayal as unfolded by the language used. The analysis is based on a quantitative and qualitative research of the Nadsat code/(anti-)language of the novel.