Context. Stylistic Context.

Arnold: Two main types of a text analysis can be distinguished: 1) first – the major idea is singled out (hypothesis) and then lexical, syntactical, morphological and phonetic parts of the text are singled out that can either confirm or refute this idea. 2) vise versa: attention is drawn to some remarkable formal peculiarity of the text (for example repetition of a word or a group of words, unusual word order, etc) and then an explanation to this peculiarity is found and finally the major idea is formulated. Both types of analysis should reveal the unity of form and content, the whole and its parts, but in the first case the fist stage of analysis is the content, in the second – form and details. The effectiveness of analysis mainly depends upon the first hypothesis if it is correct. The two approaches of analysis do not exclude each other. They can complement each other. Both types are tightly connected with the context. All types of foregrounding are based upon the interaction of the text elements and the structure of the whole. The major statement of the context theory says that a text cannot be a simple linear word combination. Such a type of information transfer would be not effective. A text is a structure with inner organization the elements of which are significant not only on their own but also as they are connected with other elements including extratextual elements, extralinguial reality, the situation. The essence of the context theory by N.N. Amosova sounds like this: polysemy and homonymy which are characteristic of the language vocabulary are removed in speech due to the context and speech situation. In this theory the situation is not part of the context but is singled out separately. Context is a connection between a word and its indicator which is tired syntactically with the actual (актуализированное) word either directly or indirectly (непосредственно или опосредованно). Context may be constant or inconstant, lexical or grammatical (syntactical, morphological or mixed). The indicator is understood as a component that allows to say definitely which of the possible meanings of a word is meant. This theory presupposes the coincidence of the codes of the addresser and addressee and semantic discreetness of a word (polysemantic words have such a semantic structure where the lexical continuum breaks up into lexical semantic variations). This theory is inconsistent for stylistic analysis as the codes of the reader and the author actually never coincide as in a text a word acquires some “meaningful overtones” (B.A.Larin). The situation (in the theory by Amosova) is some extralingual conditions which also point at which of the possible meanings a word bears in this text. Life situation and text situation can be singled out. A direct demonstration is included into life situation. Text situation is divided into the description of a life situation and general theme of the text. W. Veinreich stated that a context allows not only to choose one of the possible word meanings but also to identify some additional components to the word meaning or (hypersemantisation), vise versa, the loss of some components of the meaning (disemantisation). Hyper-n is characteristic of poetic speech, di-n – of expressive colloquial speech. Works by M. Riffater and Yu. Lotman are viewd as a transfer from the linguistic context theory to stylistic context theory. Riffater drew much attention to the context study. He stated that while reading some text the reader skips some parts of it. The process of decoding should be directed by the author and thus the content must be organized in such a way that the attention is drawn to the most important parts. On this statement Riffater bases his understanding of the stylistic context and stylistic device. A stylistic context is a part of the text which contains an unexpected unusual component. It is formed by the opposition (contrast) of the stylistic device and its environment. The effectiveness of the stylistic device is based upon the deviation not from the norm of language but from the norm of this text. The function of the stylistic context consists not in the removal of polysemy and homonymy (this is the function of the language context), but in creating new meanings and shades of meanings. Stylistic context simultaneously allows to realize two and more meanings of a word, to create new connotations and by other means to provide the information compression and thus to provide the highest effectiveness of information transfer. The subject of the stylistic analysis is a whole text. (but in the lang.context we single out one meaning, in stylistic – find new meanings). Galperin: -.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 2427