Lexical Features of Richardson's Pamela: With Special Reference to Word-Formation

Samuel Richardson played an important role in the early history of British vovels. He described women's inner feelings in epistolary form with such vividness and delicacy as was never practiced by any of his predecessors. In examinig Richardson's style of his epistolary novels, therefore, we should not pass over his skillful use of emotional words. Actually, the lexical features serve as an essential constituent to make his works more interesting and appealing; for his "most characteristic linguistic innovation was in vocabulary," as Ian Wattaptly suggests in his The Rise of the Novel. The present paper aims at analyzing the lexical features in Richardson's Pamela mainly from the perspective of 'word-formation.' Various compound words in the novel, along with their derivatives, are discussed in comparison with those found in its contemporary literary works.