A linguistic approach to the erotism of Lady Chatterly's lover

Abstract

The present paper pursues two main goals. First, we attempt to carry out a linguistic analysis of "Lady Chatterley’s Lover" in search for some evidence in favour of the line of literary criticism which regards the novel as an erotic rather than as a pornographic work. Second, we take the language of the novel as the starting point for the description of the defining characteristics of the language of erotism. In so doing, we shall pay attention to its syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive characteristics.