«Elizabeth, Beth, Betsy e Bess andarono tutte insieme a cercare un nido d’uccello». Il potenziale diegetico e associativo del nome nel romanzo psicologico di Shirley Jackson

Abstract

The paper focuses on the fictional names in the novel The Bird’s Nest (1954) by Shirley Jackson. The analysis is conducted exploiting: 1) the pattern of the «intralinguistic mind», developed by Sasso (1993) to identify the anagrammatic computations in poetic texts; 2) the theories on phonosymbolism developed by (psycho)linguistic studies on the phenomenon; 3) an experimental test created ad hoc. The overall results of the research reveal the strong semic dynamism of the Jacksonian names, able to catalyze the thematic cores of the narration through a triggering of a dense network of phono-conceptual and phono-symbolic associations in the mind of the author and reader.