Силистика в английском языке

Lecture 1 

Text Linguistics. Text Analysis. Types of Information. Pragmatic Segmentation. Context Segmentation. 

    In recent years a branch of linguistic science has been developed which has acquired the name of “text-linguistics”. Modern text linguistics aims at investigating the objective criteria of constructing texts, of singling out the basic constituents and their functional characteristics; it investigates the principles of text composition and text-forming factors, text categories, etc.

    The text is also studied by history and theory of literature, by stylistics. Text analysis or text interpretation is on the borderline of the above mentioned sciences. The aim of text interpretation is the study of a literary text as a complex structural unity of interrelated elements which serve to expose the subject and the message of the text; its aim is to help derive maximum information, both explicit and implicit, greater aesthetic pleasure. [So, stylistics and text analysis have much in common]

    What is a text? In his book “Text as an Object of Linguistic Study” prof. I.R. Galperin suggests the following definition of the concept of “text”.

    “Text is a product of language activity, complete, realized in the form of a written document revealing the writer’s purport. Text consists of a title (or a heading) and a number of special elements (called supraphrasal units) combined by various types of lexical, grammatical, logical and stylistic cohesion”. 

    Text Segmentation.

    Integrity of word perception [as the basic condition of art] is inconceivable without conscious realization of the subordination and inter dependance of its components. Segmentation of any text has double purpose:

1. To present spans of utterance separately for easing the reader’s perception of the information.
2. For the author himself to reveal the character of temporal, space, image-bearing and other types of cohesion of the components.

    Pragmatic Segmentation.

    The first type of text segmentations – pragmatic – takes into account the size of the part (unit), which usually secures the reader’s ability to grasp this volume of information without loss.

    Into what parts may any text fall?

    Let’s take a novel as a maximum text. The largest unit of a novel is “volume” or “book” in their terminological meanings (those of a component). Then segmentation goes downwards: part, chapter, paragraphs and supraphrasal units.

    Context Segmentation.

    Pragmatic segmentation intermingles with another type of text division – context segmentation. It distinguishes the following forms of speech acts.

1. The author’s speech:

1. narration
2. description (of nature, personages, situation, etc)
3. the author’s digressions

2. Somebody else’s speech:

1. dialogue (with the author’s remarks)
2. quotation

3. Represented speech.

    The aim of context segmentation is to vary the form of speech. Such switch over contributes to a more powerful depiction of the situation in which communication is taking place and gives an opportunity to vary the means of information transfer. Both types of text segmentation are interrelated and implicitly disclose the conceptual informational. It must be born in mind that text segmentation depends on such text categories as information, cohesion, intergration and others.

    Types of Information.

    Being an obligatory text characteristic the category of information may manifest itself in various terms: from zero information (when the text content presents nothing new and only repeats what is well-known) to conceptual information (which is to be revealed by scrupulous text analysis).

    The information conveyed by a text may be of different kinds depending on its pragmatic purpose. Three kinds of information may be singled out, i.e.

    content-factual information

    content-conceptual information

    supralinear (implied) information

    Content-Factual Information.

     Content-factual information (CFI) gives knowledge about facts, events, processes, which were, are or will be taking place in the world, real or imaginary. CFI is explicit, i.e. it is always verbally expressed. Linguistic signs expressing content-factual information are used in their primary dictionary meaning.

    CFI and other types of information are realized in the plot and other components of the poetic structure of the text.

    Content-Conceptual Information.

    Content-conceptual information (CCI) imparts to the reader the author’s individual understanding of relations between phenomena described by means of content conceptual information, their complex psychological and aesthetico-cognitive interaction. It follows then that CCI is mainly found in fiction where it reigns supreme. It is no secret that a layman is incapable of adequate perception of content conceptual information and cannot grasp the concept of the work. This results from the reader’s inability to use the inventory of stylistic analysis and his inadequate general cultural background.

    But even educated readers may not infrequently reveal divergent views as to the purport of the text. This possibility of various interpretations of the work is the basis of art.

    Supralinear (Implied) Information.

    Supralinear (Implied) Information (CLI) derived from content-factual information, it is facultative. Perception of CLI is based on man’s psychic ability to perceive two different but interrelated lines of information simultaneously. e.g. a symbol (a red rose). It is based on expressing abstract concepts via concrete facts. Its interpretation presents no difficulty.

    However in emotive prose supralinear (implied) information is not so easily decoded, it is vague, elusive and sometimes imperceptible.

    e.g. My heart is a singing bird.

    Decoding supralinear (implied) information is a creative process. In these terms it is necessary to mention the reader’s thesaurus. The richer the thesaurus, the better developed the reader’s ability of analytical text perception, the more outlined and clear becomes the implied information.

    [Implication – a conclusion or judgement based on evidence not stated directly; the drawing out of the meaning behind a word or words.]

    Plot is a sequence of events in which the characters are involved, the theme and the idea revealed. Events are made of episodes; episodes, in their turn of smaller action details.

    Poetic structure of the literary text is so modeled that certain of its elements [which have already occurred in the text] recur again at definite intervals. These recurrent elements may be a poetic detail, an image, a phrase, a word. The recurrence of an element may have several functions.

1. It organizes the subject matter, gives it a dynamic flow. [see Сосновская p. 33]
2. It may represent the leitmotif of the literary work, expressing the author’s message [see Сосновская p. 33]

    A poetic detail is the part selected to represent the whole. There are details of landscapes, events, etc. The central image of any literary work, that of a character is manifold, so are the details that represent it. These may be the details of: action, speech, physical portrait, ethical, political views, etc.

    A poetic detail may be some directly observed and directly expressed feature of an image. Thus the image of cold autumn is conveyed in such details [“In Another Country” by E. Hemingway]. “… small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers.”

    Each and every event of the plot has a beginning, a development and end. The plot, accordingly, consists of exposition, story, climax and denouement.

    In the exposition the necessary preliminaries to the action are laid out, such as the time, the place, and the subject of the action. Also some light may be cast on the circumstances that will influence the development of the action. This may be done directly or by means of flashbacks.

    [Flashback – in narration the interruption of the story to recount events that took place earlier. The term is especially appropriate for motion pictures and staged drama].

    Story (or knitting, or knotting) is that part of the plot which represents the beginning of the collision and the collision itself.

    Suspense – causal arrangement of events going from the knitting and leading to the climax, upward moving of the action.

    Climax – the point in the plot of a story at which the major conflicts are resolved. Several minor crises may precede the climax but once the main problem is solved, interest wanes. If the denouement is lengthy without adding to the tale, events are said to be anticlimactic.

    Denouement (or anticlimax) is the event or events that bring the action to the end; the unraveling of plot complications.

    There is no uniformity as far as the above mentioned elements of the plot and their sequence in the text are concerned.

    A work of narrative prose that has all the elements mentioned above: exposition, plot, suspense, climax, denouement as clearly discernable parts is said to have a closed plot structure. [e.g. American short stories by W. Irving, Bret Hart, O. Henry, etc.]

    A literary work which does not contain all the above mentioned elements is said to have an open plot structure.

    One should mention  here “the Slice of Life” technique – the narrative and dramatic technique that avoids either exposition or denouement; it answers no questions and solves no problems. The reader is permitted, as it were, to open the door, peer at the interchanges between characters for a while and close the door. That, say the advocates, is the way life is: it does not begin or end neatly at any specific place.

    Plot structure is not a formal factor, it is conditioned entirely by the content. Let us refer to the short story genre (which is sometimes considered to be the highest form of narrative prose).

    There are two types of short stories.

    First: a plot (action) short story. It has a closed structure, the plot is built upon one collision. The action dramatically develops only to explode at the very end. O. Henry’s stories reveal this pattern very well. O. Henry is also known for trick-or twist-endings: a narrative device which consists in a sudden revelation which provides climax or denouement.

    Second: a psychological (character) short story. It generally shows the drama of a character’s inner world. The structure is open. The traditional components are not clearly discernible and the action is less dynamic. Many of E. Hemingway’s stories are of such a type.

    e.g. “Cat in the Rain”. [The plot is practically eventless. But an attentive reader will see that out of this surface layer there emerges another – the implied, the metaphoric. The image of a cat croutching under a table to avoid the rain suggests an analogy with the state of misery and nostalgic restlessness the young American woman is in. This poetic content has conditioned the specific composition and plot-structure.    

    Foreshadowing (Promise). In a literary work foreshadowing hints at what is to occur at a later point in the plot. “Surprise is not so satisfying an ingredient as expectation. Promise is a deliberate device to whet the reader’s expectation and hold his interest.”

    Narrative Hook – a device used especially at the beginning of a story to whet the reader’s curiosity until further information genuinely interests him. For example in E.A. Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillada” which begins.

    “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could;

      but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.”

    What reader can resist being curious about the “injuries” (which incidentally are never explained) or the urge to witness the “revenge”?

    Plot Structure and Literary Time.

    Life events span in time; they make a sequence of the past, the present and the future.

    Time in the literary work differs from natural, historical time. The narrative may begin at any moment in the life of the character and end at any moment, which is not necessary the one which chronologically follows the former.

    Time in the literary work is called literary or poetic, and its representation is conditioned by the laws of narrative literature and the work’s content. The narrative can be retrospective and prospective «За мной, мой читатель, и только за мной, и я покажу тебе такую любовь!»

 

     Lecture 2 

    Literary Text as Poetic Structure. Verbal and Supraverbal Layers of the Literary Text. Elements of the Layers. 

    Communication or exchange of information plays a most important role in all phenomena of the world. 70% of our lifetime is spent in various forms of communications activities – oral (speaking, listening) or written (reading, writing).

    The message is common ground for communicants in an act of communication, an indispensable element in the exchange of information between two participants of the communicative act – the addresser (the supplier of information, the speaker, the writer) and the addressee (the receiver of the information, the listener, the reader).

    The literary work is an act of communication of the author with the reader. It can be shown by the relationship the author-the literary work-the reader. But the existence of this relationship should not automatically give grounds for an assumption that what the author has conveyed in the work passes on to the reader naturally and easily. In other words, the reading of the work does not necessary result in the reader’s direct perception of what the author has conveyed.

    It is no mere chance that the principle the author/the reader communication is called a funnel principle. 

 

    At best the sides of the funnel should be absolutely equal but because of different individualities on both sides of the funnel it is impossible. The complexity of the literary work (since it involves the interrelation of the objective and the subjective, the real and the imagined, the direct and the implied) makes the perception of it a creative effort.

    Verbal and Supraverbal Layers of the Literary Text.

    While reading a literary text one gradually moves from the first word of it on to the last; the words combine into phrases, phrases into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs make larger passages: chapters, sections, and parts. All these represent the verbal layer of the literary text.

    At the same time when one reads a text of imaginative literature sees another layer gradually emerging out of these verbal sequences. One sees that word sequences represent a series of events, conflicts and circumstances in which characters of the literary work happen to find themselves.

    One sees that all these word sequences make a composition, a plot, a genre, and a style and they all go to create an image of reality and that through this image the author conveys his message, his vision of the world.

    Plot, theme, conflict, genre, style, image, character and the like make the supraverbal layer, which is, nevertheless, entirely revealed in verbal sequences. The supraverbal and the verbal layers of the text are thus inseparable from each other.

    The cohesion of the two layers is known as the poetic structure of the literary text. It is the whole of the poetic structure that conveys the author’s message. One element is as important as any other, for through them all the author’s message is conveyed. All the components of the poetic structure compose a hierarchy, an organization of interdependent layers. The basic unit of the poetic structure is the word.

    Here are some elements (components) of the supraverbal layer of the text.

    Literary Image. The world of the literary work is the world of its characters, situations, conflicts, events, etc. similar to those of real life. Characters and the situations they are engaged in may be entirely fantastic, nevertheless, they, too, are inspired by objective reality.

    Literature cognizes and interprets life by re-creating life in the form of images inspired by life and in accordance with the author’s vision. Thus, for instance, Soames from J. Galsworthy’s “The Forsyte Saga” is not just an English bourgeois, but a literary character created by Galsworthy. In the image of Soames and other images the author transmits to the reader his own philosophy of life, his ethic and moral code.

    All images of the literary work constitute a hierarchial interrelation. The top of this hierarchy is the macro-image, the literary work itself, understood as an image of life visioned and depicted by the author.

    e.g. “The Forsyte Saga” by J. Galsworthy, or “An American Tragedy” by Th. Dreiser taken as a whole.

    Within the literary work it is the image of the character or characters that top the hierarchy of images. Say, the images of Old Jolyon, Soames, or the images of Clyde, Roberta. At the bottom of the hierarchy there is the word-image, or a micro-image: simile, metaphor, epithet, etc. They together with other elements build up character-images, event-images, landscape-images, etc.

    e.g. The rain hissed on the live-oak and magnolia trees (R.P. Warren).