LEXICAL CHOICES IN "THE ROAD NOT TAKEN", A POEM WRITTEN BY ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)

This paper attempts to analyse the Lexical Choices in Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken poem from the perspectives of stylistics. Stylistics is the study of style of language in literature. It seeks to account for the interpretative effects of a text through close study of its linguistic detail, such as syntactic structuring, semantic deviation, deixis, modality, etc. A piece of work cannot be properly understood without a thorough knowledge of the language, which is its medium of expression. Each register has its own characteristics style with certain lexical and grammatical choices. Poets, particularly modern ones, have successfully freed themselves from constraints of what is so called “poetic language (Sharma, 2009: 31). In this write up, the value of the game considers the lexical choices in the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost in the following categories: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, lexical categories such as synonymy, antagonymy, contradiction and their significance or effects in the poem.