Whirligig Motive in the Language of O. Henry's Short Stories
Based on a short-term separation of notion from its acoustic image and their further solid and motivated reunion, O. Henry's linguistic whirligig technique is akin - both structurally and functionally - to the genres of dictionary and coq-à-l'ane. Its ultimate aim is to renovate the verbal matter, to attain maximal correspondence between a signified and a signifying, between life and language. Having a meaningful and a formal basis in O. Henry's works, this linguistic feature derives from the writer's general aesthetics with its principal of material's homogeny and an idea that the world is a self-contained actable system ruled by destiny. Distant concepts confronting and word-play are not O. Henry's end in itself, but an additional means of depicting an imaginative worldview which meets his perceptions of a changeable and unpredictable reality.