WHERE SLOITUDE RESIDES: A PRAGMATIC – STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S THE LAGOON

Though distinct in certain aspects, pragmatics and stylistics are two interrelated interdisciplinary fields whose main concern is the quest for meaning-making in language. Being forms of meaning, metaphorical modes can be analyzed from pragmatic- stylistic stance. If stylistics is mainly concerned with linguistic interpretation of literary discourses, pragmatics unravels the contribution of the context to the construction of meaning proper. The interaction between these subfields of linguistics has led to the emergence of the hybrid term Pragmatic Stylistics.Therefore, the term Pragmatic Stylistics has been circulated in the sphere of linguistics to state the pragmatic dimension in the deconstruction of the imaginatively works of art. The study aims at investigating speech acts, with much stress on the metaphorical modes of meaning in Joseph Conrad’s The Lagoon, and how these sequences of speech act build up the narrative image of the world. The study hypothesizes that the narrative structure of the metaphorical modes in the short story are not merely a combinatory set of syntactic structures.Rather, they are the transmitters of human experience in forms of sequential speech acts. Therefore, stylistic and pragmatic components like figures of style, i.e. metaphor and simile,personification, and light- dark antitheses will be investigated so far stylistic and pragmatic walks are concerned. The study will be divided into two parts: While Part One highlights the termspragmatics, stylistics, metaphorical modes and pragmatic stylistics as a conceptual grid for the linguistic analysis, Part Two will be preoccupied with the pragmatic stylistic scrutiny and interpretation of the constituents and their function in the narrative structure of The Lagoon. The study will be rounded up with a set of concluding remarks elicited from the pragmatic stylistic analysis.