The specificity of linguistic representation of the "parent–child" relationship model in Nikolay Nosov's short stories

Children's literature plays a crucial role in the shaping and developing of child's personality, his/her worldview and system of values. It reflects and reconsiders many aspects of childhood, including "parent–child" relationship. The study seeks to explore and define the major characteristics of the "parent–child" relationship model, as it is represented in short stories by Nikolay Nosov, a famous children's writer. In the process of research, a corpus of thirty writer's works was created, and the texts were computer processed. The authors focus on the revealing of verbal indicators that repre- sent the models of socio-psychological relations in a family. Linguistic means used to represent the dichotomy of "parents–children" relationship were analyzed. The meth odology involves critical discourse analysis, content analysis, linguopoetic analysis, quantitative and qualitative methods. The results of the study of the linguistic representation of the "parent–child" model in Nosov's short stories reveal the secondary role of parental figures. It can: (a) be presented formally and latently participate in the plot development, just "giving an impulse" for a child to act or decide (47%); (b) be one of the main characters (17%); (c) be absent in the story (36%). The quantitative analysis reveals that children's first names are used more than twice as often as mama (Mum) and five times as often as papa (Dad). The results of the contextual analysis show the domination of mother's figure. The lexemes mama and papa are used much more often that neutral and official mat' (mother) and otets (father) (216 and 11, and 106 and 37, respectively), thus representing the model of a child's closer relations with a mother rather than with a father. Mother's role in Nosov's stories is confined to household chores, nutrition and looking after the children. The "mum" and "dad" concordances demonstrate both the approving and supportive style of parents' behavior and the disapproving one, sometimes with elements of labeling ("coward", "thief"). The use of formal "mother" and "father" is typical for conflict situations where parents negatively react to their child's behavior. Parents' figures are described indirectly, through their words and actions. Their main function is of a moral guidance – they strive to cultivate such qualities as responsibility, sense of duty, honesty and obedience. The model of "parent–child" relations recreated in Nosov's stories suggests parents' unquestionable authority, with abundance of directives, appeals to moral values, attempts to cause the sense of guilt. Parents' efforts aim at teaching a child how to adapt to the society, to follow its rules and regulations. The study of the verbal indicators that represent the models of social-and-role and moral-and-psychological relations in a family can be continued on the material of other children's literary texts, in synchronic and diachronic aspects as well as from the perspective of intercultural interaction.

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