The Lexical and Grammatical Semantics of Speech Verbs in Mikhail Bulgakov's Novel "The Master and Margarita" and Its Translation.

The object of the present study is speech verbs that belong to the basic vocabulary of different languages, because these words are used to designate the act of speaking, an activity peculiar to mankind. The aim of the paper is to compare the semantic, stylistic, and grammatical characteristics of various Russian speech verbs that represent direct speech in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita" and its Estonian translation. The study of the original text and its translation, conducted according to the principles of comparative stylistics, indicates a certain similarity between the usage of speech verbs in literary texts of different languages. In direct speech verbal lexemes of semantically different lexical-semantic groups become functionally equivalent. Expressive verbs of different semantics serve at the same time as a means of characterizing the speech of the novel's characters. The linguistic temporality of verbs representing direct speech is manifested in the predominant use of the past tense, which is preserved in the translation. Translators seek to preserve the denotative semantics and emotionally expressive shades of meaning of the Russian text. However, due to the national specificity of different languages, the discrepancy between the shades of meaning of words, and sometimes due to the preferences of translators, the offered equivalents are at times denotatively inaccurate (but functionally possible) or less expressive, which causes some loss of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]