This study attempts to describe the distribution of lexical items and their sense relations in the plot sequences of three detective short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The objectives of this study are to describe the distribution of the lexical items in the plot sequences and to relate between the lexical items’ distribution and the plot sequences by applying the semantic sense relations (Cruse 2004). For this purpose, three Doyle’s detective stories had been chosen: The Boscombe Valley Mystery (BVM), The Five Orange Pips (FOP), and The Adventure of the Speckled Band (ASB).
This study is a comparative study, applying text-oriented approach (Klarer 2007) which is combining stylistic and structural methods (Klarer 2007). The stylistic analysis is applied to the linguistic focus of this study, the lexical items and their semantic sense relations, and the structural analysis is applied to the literary focus of the texts’ plot sequences. The main supporting theories applied in the analysis are: the modification of the conventional plot theory (Pickering and Hoeper 1981:16), the lexical items of Richards and Schmidt (2002), and the sense relations of inclusion of Cruse (2004). The results of the analyses indicate that the lexical choices and their semantic sense relations are related to the sequences of the stories’ plot. The plot sequences are closely defined by the lexical choices that develop the plot features of each plot sequence. These results approve that the narrative of Doyle’s detective fiction is a matter of linguistic choices, particularly the lexical items. The explicit uses of the lexical items and the linkages of the senses of these lexemes identify Doyle’s works as the clear and fully clued detective fictions. |