MINOR SENTENCES AS STAND-INS OF SMALL THINGS IN ARUNDHATI ROY’S THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS

Abstract

The purpose of the current study is to understand Arundhati Roy’s style to explore the themes working behind her grammatical structures and her experimentation with the English language. This research is qualitative in nature and the data for the present study have been selected through purposive sampling technique from Arundhati Roy’s only fictional work so far, ‘The God of Small Things’.  The methodology adopted for carrying out the current investigation is based on Leech and Short’s (2007) checklist of linguistic and stylistic categories to evaluate a literary text in stylistic terms. The checklist is modified and Muir’s (1972) classification of minor sentences is incorporated at grammatical level of the checklist to analyze frequent sentence types in the novel. The results were astonishing as they went against Roy’s claim that she does not consciously build this book on any level of discourse. The findings indicated that every word is carefully chosen to convey a particular message. The investigation of sentence types revealed that minor sentences are more frequent as compared to the major sentences and this high frequency of minor sentences in the fictional world of the novel is in keeping with the child language features such as repetition, neologism, and above all innocence. The findings also unmasked how this choice of sentence structure is in keeping with the main themes of the story: breaking bounds and social inequality, caste and class systems. This investigative study will help future researchers to stylistically analyze a fictional work in terms of structure and Narratology.