Stylistic Performance through Affective Marking: A Case of Multilingual Literary Discourse

Abstract

This paper provides an overall analysis of how multi-lingual writer like Amitav Ghosh write about emotion in his literary text, and emphasize on how multilingual authors display emotion/affect through use of literary multilingualism (affective markers) combined with writer style. Through use of multiple strategies, they reduces the limitations of interpretation of their texts. Furthermore, this paper highlighted the centrally sociolinguistic and cognitive dimensions of the relationships between multilingualism and emotion and how this is influenced by assumptions of Relevance Theory i.e. optimal relevance in a literary text. One should expect to find relationships between sociolinguistic diversity and affective expression for most authors in locally specific ways, whether multilingual or not. Such scholarship can then illuminate how the authors by using literary multilingualism through writer style and affective markers can shape emotions across various contexts in a literary text. Future research into multilingualism and emotion should continue to distinguish between how multilingual authors use linguistic forms to show feeling, and how they express about feeling in their created texts.

Keywords: Language, Culture, Literary Multilingualism, Style, Affect and Relevance Theory