THE ROLE OF STYLISTIC FIGURES IN CONCEPTUALISING AND TEXT HIGHLIGHTING THE POSITION OF A DEAF PERSON IN SOCIETY (BASED ON THE BOOK BY ISABELLE GUYON “DO WE HEAR THE DEAF POORLY?”)

Abstract

Communication difficulties constantly arise in society, but they can become more pronounced when it comes to interacting with communities that differ in terms of physical, psychological, and cultural characteristics. This article will discuss the understanding of the place of the community of people with hearing impairments in contemporary Francophone discourse, using Isabelle Guyon’s work «Do we hear the Deaf poorly?», which was preceded by the autobiographical novels by Victor Abbou «The Key to the World» and Emmanuelle Laborit «The Cry of the Seagull». It provides an overview of key research works in anthropology, sociology, literary studies, and linguistics (M. Da Silveira Schmitz, A. Minguy, D. Poirier, C. Cuxac, F. Armstrong) which focus on the issues of development and communication of people with deafness. The article analyses the stylistic devices used to depict and emphasise the situation of a deaf person in contemporary French society. It has been found that a prominent place among them belongs to the metaphor. According to the scientific methods of G. Lakoff, M. Johnson, M. Black, and B. Pudelko, it was established that metaphor allows the construction and structuring of concepts such as «The life of a deaf person – Struggle / War» and «Marginalisation of a deaf person», indicating the agent of action, the action itself, the object / instrument of action, and the circumstances of action. In addition, metaphorical chains were identified in the analysed text, which implement all components of these concepts in the microcontext. To expressively highlight the issue of the marginalisation of the deaf community in society, the author uses wordplay based on paronymy and polysemy, as well as oxymoron. It should be noted that, unlike metaphor, which is iconic in nature like sign language, those figures of speech are primarily based on the contrast between phonetic form and semantics. Therefore, in our opinion, metaphor is dominant in the messages of deaf people, while other stylistic figures occur exclusively in the speech of the author who can hear.