В.Г.БАЙКОВ “РИСОВЫЕ ЗЕРНА”, ДОМИНАНТЫ И СВЕТСКИЕ РАЗГОВОРЫ / ЗАМЕТКИ О ГРАНИЦАХ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИОННОГО АКТА /

“РИСОВЫЕ ЗЕРНА”, ДОМИНАНТЫ И СВЕТСКИЕ РАЗГОВОРЫ / ЗАМЕТКИ О ГРАНИЦАХ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИОННОГО АКТА /

В статье рассматривается комплекс вопросов, связанных с проблемой границ учебной интерпретации текста и схемой действий читателя как высказанной рефлексии. Подчеркивается, что проблема границ интерпретационного акта решается трактовкой доминанты как субъективного фактора понимания, вводящего читателя в герменевтический круг и выводящего из него. В связи с этим дается критика концепции выдвижения и градации признака как категорий стилистики декодирования. Указывается также на опасность, которую таят в себе оценочныe стереотипы художественных текстов, навязываемые изучающим иностранную филологию в качестве образцов адекватного метаязыка филологического анализа текста, что провоцирует отказ от рефлексии, отвлекает от нее внимание, а иногда и принимается как ее суррогат.

1,5 п/л., библиогр., примечания 5стр. Яз. англ., русск.

V.G.BAIKOV

“SIBBOLETHS”, SALIENT FEATURES AND SMALL TALK / REFLECTIONS ON TEXT INTERPRETATION LIMIT/

This paper’s concern is the problem of limiting Text Interpretation Act for teaching purposes and controlling readers ‘ schema by means of Salient Feature selection as a subjective aspect of text comprehension and “uttered reflection”. The Salient Feature thus viewed shows itself as a factor involving the reader in, and taking him out of, the Hermeneutic Cycle. In this connection, a criticism is given of the Theory of Foregrounding and Climax Gradation as Decoder Stylistics categories. Foreign languages and Philology teachers and students are warned against the danger of stereotyped evaluative cliches often fed to the learners as patterns of authentic Text Interpretetion metalanguage just to keep the ball rolling in discussing books. It is claimed that suchlike practices, being mistaken for actual philological analysis, tend to kill the learners’ reflection abilities by diverting them from this cognitive process.

V.G.BAIKOV

Horlivka State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, Ukraine /

“SIBBOLITHS”, SALIENT FEATURES AND SMALL TALK / REFLECTIONS ON TEXT INTERPRETATION LIMIT /

It will be claimed here that Interpretation Act for teaching purposes should somehow be limited, because the Hermeneutic Cycle is a cycle of Infinity. This is primarily a problem of crucial pragmatic significance warning against any “philological analysis” of a literary work being made infinite too and thereby pointless, particularly when applied to larger genres like novels etc.

The problem of relevant selection in the choice of the artistic form to start and stop interpretation has been raised, among others, by Y. I. Kovbasenko / 2 / . This author’s remarks deserve special attention, both critical and constructive, since his work is not only one of the very few that undertake to cross the t’s and dot the i’s in a seemingly trivial and therefore obscure matter / the obscure trivia are hardly ever liable to being noticed and reasonably explained away / , but also because it gets into my own focus as well, the focus of professional interest and a teaching experience of long standing which has put my pen to this paper .

Another warning I should like to make to this paper’s reader in the “ far abroad “ is to the effect that my criticism of some detrimental practices in teaching Text Interpretation / 3 / is based exclusively on my personal experience at home, and I cannot vouch for the topicality of similar problems outside . Nevertheless I believe that this criticism will prove of some use for my brethren - in - shop everywhere because “ a man’ s a man , for a’that “.

Considering the need for , and a scrupulous screening of, the relevant poetic features as the “ herms “, or clues to “ philological analysis “, Y.I.Kovbasenko rejects or accepts with reservation the well - known theories of Foregrounding and Strong Position as methods of selecting suchlike “ herms “ .The former because many cases of Foregrounding , such as , for instance , the recurrent key words , are , strictly speaking , not “ foregrounding “ but “ backgrounding “ , or , to put it more legibly - suggestive extinguishing of senses, and the latter because ,perhaps, no hierarchy of “ strong positions “ has so far been “ unpacked “, and by this hierarchy Y. I. Kovbasenko presumably means the part / whole relationship in the text .

Referring to the Old Testameant story about separating the two hostile Israeli tribes the people of one of which could not pronounce the right sibilant in “shibboleth” that stands for “ a grain of rice “ / Judges , 12 : 5-4 / , Y.I.Kovbasenko lays down his own view of selecting fiction text clues having the “ sibbolethic “ function , that is the function of speech behaviour signals belonging to the various levels of language structure and distinguishing the deviant abuse of one speaker from the rest of them, or the foreigner’s accent from the talk of the native speakers . In this way ,the “sibboleths “, according to Y.I.Koovbasenko , emerge as actualized signs of text information values that are minimally sufficient to start / or stop when exhausted / the reader’s or interpreter’s schema .

Proceeding from this point , Y.I.Kovbasenko associates the “ sibbolethic “ function exclusively with the micro- and macrotextual device of Gradation / Climax /. As one of the numerous examples to illustrate it , he mentions a scandalous scene in M. Bulgakov’s “ Master and Margaret “ / 4 / where the Cat Hippo suddenly interrupts the concert given by his gang of the “ evil ones “ ordering the conductor , in a human voice, to stop it : “ The party’s over, Master. Blow us a farewell march now “/ 5 /. M. Bulgakov’s description of Hippo’s talk and its effect on the poor conductor goes like this : “ Hardly aware of what he was doing, the stunned conductor waved his stick, and the orchestra gave forth a tune. They did not play it, neither did they strike it up, nor even blare it off, but, after the Cat’s ghastly manner of putting it, “ blew out “ some weird, wild, disgracefully challenging and unearthly outrage of a march “/ 6 /.

Nevertheless, this approach to selecting the clues calls for certain reservations as well. What is valid about it, are two points involved in the process, psychological and semiotic.

The former shows itself in cases of the so-called “modified mentality speech behaviour” / 7 /. Given an association of every typical plot structure Climax with the emotional stress of personages who lose control of their talk in such a condition, the sibboleth’s “ suicidal “ role becomes quite spectacular. We were reminded of that in a once popular Soviet film that had “played up” a situation in which a young woman in labour couldn’t scream her lemantations even in that foreign language which she was supposed to have perfectly mastered / 8 /.

The latter point comes out when the sibboleths are regarded as fragmentary signals of “World’s View” which bring about what Maupassant called “The Mathematics of Art” that creates “big” effects by “small” means, such as the use of “blow” in the final position of Gradation Climax explaining the reaction of the orchestra conductor who had been frightened out of his wits / 9 /. Such an effect is not only syntagmatic, but paradigmatic as well. The sibboleth emerges here as a sign’s distinctor consolidated by its positional structure.

It seems quite reasonable to claim, then, that the “sibbolethic” approach does prove valid as a Contrastive Linguistics marker in general betraying the writer’s / speaker’s / foreign or substandard accent, and thereby his or her language or dialectal salient features doing it much more conspicuously than a complete and systemic contrastive description would ever do, as in the case of the substandard “blow” or, for that matter, Eliza Doolittle’s “them slippers” after she’d already been made a lady of /10/. Consequently, the “sibbolethic”sets may be effectively employed for extinguishing transference in teaching foreign languages or correcting the native talk.

At the same time, one could hardly side with the opinion that sibboleths should necessarily be stuck to the final position in Gradations when the text is being linearly unfolded, for the author’s syntagmatic arrangement of his personages’ emotive gradations does not correlate psychologically with how people actually feel about it in the empirical reality. Gradations as a rhetorical device are the product of the auctorial interpretations of such reality which may diverge from its normal course. In this connection, and returning to B. Shaw’s example of “them slippers”, let us observe what happens in Act Four of “Pygmalion” where Eliza quarrels with Higgins on account of his unconcern for her future as a “lady” of his own making /11/:

“L i z a / crushed by superior strength and weight /. Whats to become of me ? Whats to become of me ?

L i z a . You dont care. I know you dont care. You wouldnt care if I was dead. I’m nothing to you - not so much as them slippers.

There is a complex “counterpoint” of both dialogic roles here that reminds one of a “mirror fugue”. First, Higgins’s Gradation does not conform to Kovbasenko’s scheme in every respect. It is partly provoked by Liza’s “annoying” questions. The other part of it is enacted by Liza’s talk and divided between the roles. While Liza’s Gradation from the standard to the substandard betraying her lower background does correlate with the scheme, Higgins’s does not, as he does just the other way round, from his interlocutor ‘s substandard / that drives him mad as a bull would be by a red rag /, to his own standard. It so happens, then, that either Kovbasenko’s “sibbolethic” scheme is all wrong, or it should be reinterpreted structuralistically and taken systemocentrically. That would mean that sibboleths may be both standard and deviant provided a contrast between the roles in a dialogue is there in full accord with the Hjelmslevian model of Constellation.

Viewed thus, Y.I. Kovbasenko’s example from “Master and Margaret” does not seem to be particularly convincing. The device of Gradation there is used in the author’s evaluation of Hippo’s talk, not in presenting it, that is, it is descriptive but not demonstrative. Although in some other examples adduced by Kovbasenko this is not the case, and Gradation is rather shown than described, it still does not testify why sibboleths should necessarily be associated with the gradational positions. As a matter of fact, they prove to be one of the traditional means of speech characerization, and not exclusively the emotive one.

Next, I believe that the concepts of Foregrounding and Strong Position should be criticized otherwise than is suggested by Y. I. Kovbasenko. True, Foregrounding as such, likewise any allomorphic features in Contrastive Typology, will certainly present a valild identification of any fictional text as against non-fictional, that is, it is “sibbolethic” by nature. Nevertheless, in the context of the latest cognitive studies which have affected significantly both Philological Hermeneutics and Poetics, the Theory of Foregrounding reveals itself as noticeably biased. The bias seems to be in favour of the objective at the expense of the subjective factor of the reading comprehension. process.

As is generally known, the concept of Foregrounding was introduced into philological use by P. Garvin / 12/, M. Halliday /13/, G. Leech /14/, S. Levin /15/, M. Riffaterre /16/ and R. Jacobson /17/ and was readily picked up as re-interpretation of the Prague Linguistic’s idea of “automation” and “de-automation” /actualization/. In the Soviets, between the 70s and 80s, Foregrounding was broadly acclaimed and advertised by prof. I. V. Arnold and app;ied as method to Decorder Stylistics in a number of her teaching guides /18/, /19/, /20/.

Yet, strictly speaking, the theory and practice of Foregrounding have never been an asset of West European, nor of Anglo-American Linguistics, Poetics and Literature. The Prague, and later the Anglo-American Functionalism is a precious gift of the Russian “Silver Age” that was brought to Europe through the effort of such outstanding scholars as N. Trubetskoy and S. Kartsevsky, and to America by R. Jacobson, and to all of them taken together by such celebrities of Poetics, Literary Criticism and the Russian “Formalism” as M. Bakhtin, V. Shklovsky, A. F. Losev and such our contemporaries as Y. M. Lotman who is no longer with us.

It was already as far back as shortly before the first experiments at the OPOYAZ - the Russian abbrevation for “ The Society of Poetic Language Studies” /1915 - 1925/ that this “ test tube” of the Russian “Formalism” produced V. V. Rozanov with his idea of “textual violence”, a closer look into which is taken in /21/. Anticipating the notion of Foregrounding in its modern interpretation, V. V. Rozanov wrote in one of his books /22/ that ideal comprehensive reading should drive the reader crazy. Many years later the Soviet poet Sergei Narovchatov would echo V. V. Rozanov to the effect that if Poetry were created by reason alone, it would miss some tinge of craziness about it that gives it charm because there should be in it more magic of feeling than the magic of the word.

It must be stressed in this connection that the study of emotive “shocks” like these in fiction will always result in a discovery of the “verbal violence” technique which, in a sense, is present even in such an outburst of creativity as the state of catharsis. Garcia Lorca’s life story, for instance, has it that once he had an incident at the polilce station when interrogated as to the reality of an episode in one of his poems. It said in the poem that right in front of his house a gypsy woman was moaning because they had chopped off her breasts, put them on a tray and exhibited for the sake of public profanation. When the poet explained that it was not fact but fiction, and that the two mustn’t be mixed up, the gendarme began to threaten him because, as he said, ideas are more dangerous than reality as they are more “expressive” / and, as it appears in view of what has just been said about the “shock” philosophy - more violent/.

Rozanov’s text and theatre are based all over on this kind of “shock” technique. In another book of his /23/ he wrote that ideas mostly visited him on a horse tram. The tram would shake and toss the ideas out of his shaking brains. As I. A. Zherebkina reminds us /24/, “to shake” in Russian /”встряхнуть”/ is etymologically associated with the idea of being hung up by the rib - one of the most vandalistic acts of corporal punishment in the ancient Rus’. The technique of Rozanov’s text is mostly either a “stream of consciousness”, or its sudden break off. It is either a slowing down of the action’s development by small quantation /25/ and hyper-explication, or its acceleration by instantaneous role changing like in “Del Arte” comedies where an instant change of masks is more important than their appearances. It is either a condensation and “crumpling” of the crisp “foldings” of the discourse “texture”, or just the other way round, that is - “smoothing them over”. In addition, there’s always a monstrous cocktail of farce and horror that carries the reader or viewer away in its wild stream of quickly changing impressions without giving them a moment’s speculation.

In a sense, some of the “textual violence” philosophy is shared by the English Nonsense Poetry and Poetics a la Edward Lear, although their tonality keys are far from being identical. Lear’s kind of “violence” is rather the “violence” of usage than the “violence” of situation and/ or composition. Here the idea of “minus device” suggests itself readily enough, that is the idea like the one of the numerical value less than zero in Mathematics/26/. Translated into the more familiar Chomskyite jargon, this is what we usually call “half-grammatical structures”.

At the lexico-grammatical level this technique makes the word senseless while preserving its sound envelope exactly in the same way as L. Carroll’s Alice enjoyed the words “lattitude” and “longitude” as “nice” and “grand” without knowing what they mean, or as putting familiar words in alien context, as in : THE HAT IS SOFTER THAN A SHIP’S SCREW, but THE BEE IS SHARPER THAN A BALLOON, etc. At the level of deixis it consists in an elimination of the referent, as in “HERE” HAS GONE TO “THIS”, and “THIS”HAS GONE TO “THAT”, or, likewise, in a change of the deictic viewpoint, like Alice’s world behind the mirror which materializes Mother Goose’s virtual reality:

At the lexical level it consists in the use of the nonsense words as in “Jabberwocky” :

or in the works by V. Khlebnikov, the Master Spirit of all Rusian Nonsense Verse. At the syntactic level it shows in the violation of combinability of the “a-grief-ago” or “colorness-green-ideas-sleep-furiously” kind / disagreement /. At the level of composition it employs the transposition of the keys like “seriousness-humour”, “the irrational” - “the rational and learned” etc. In other words, “minus device” is the phylosophy of emancipation from meaning as the “earthly gravitation” of language’s principles that makes itself involved in the sphere of mysticism.

Thus the “violence of text” begins with the violation a/ of language, b/ of the standard “frames” /scipts/ which normally describe the elementary /”kernel”/ situations fed by human experience into man’s memory. It had been realized by the artistically- minded prior to the scholarly-minded, and those scholarly-minded in the Silver Age Russia had realized it long before the terms of “half-grammaticity” and “Foregrounding”or “frames” firmly establilshed themselves in the linguistic, poetic and Artificial Intelligence folklore. Among those scholarly-minded, the Russian linguist A. M. Peshkovsky, and some time later - the Soviet acad. L. V. Shcherba were perhaps the earliest partisans of Edward Lear in Linguistics to usher in the era of anomaly testing as a method of studying the language norm through deviance. A. M. Peshkovsky, for instance, insisted in one of his papers /27/ that Grammar should be taught not only on the material of standard usage, but also on the substandard one, which he believed to be an “objective approach” to language study as opposed to the “ normative” approach. He stressed that learning to write and speak correctly wants some demonstrating the way people do it “incorrectly”. L. V. Shcherba went further than that. In one of his papers that had gone in the golden thesaurus of the Soviet Linguistics /28/ he wondered why not use deviant nonsenses as a linguistic experiment. The history of L. V. Shcherba’s “glokaya kouzdra” is no less dramatic than the history of Chomsky and Dell Hymes’s “green ideas”/29/. Anomaly testing was used by S. D. Katsnelson/30/ for the purpose of “unpacking” a number of the so-called “covert” semantic categories of the language and is now applied to the logical analysis of Linguistic Semantics.

It is the extremes of the kind mentioned that give one although a somewhat fragmentary, but, at the same time, vivid impression of Foregrounding as de-automation shock. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be quite fair to deny Foregrounding in non-fictional texts like scientific discourse either. But here it is associated exclusively with the logical emphasis as opposed to the illogical nature of the emotive shock in fiction. The logical emphasis is realized meta-textually by way of using cliches like IT MUST BE POINTED OUT THAT... and so on. The comparison testifies to the fact that the definition of Foregrounding as a marker of significance which can often be seen in the course books of Style and Rhetoric just misses the point. This is the definition of a communicative, not a poetic nature. The actual technique of Foregrounding in fiction is based on a textual, not a meta-textual shock, a shock which is emotive but not rational. This is exactly where Y. I. Kovbasenko’s remark concerning Foregrounding being sometimes reduced to “Backgrounding”comes in, for the latter one may produce a shock as well as the former. This may be true about deciphering implications, allusions or implicit cohesion, particularly foreshadowings / cataphoric signals / as omens of disaster which are often the case in horror plots or elsewhere. Here are some examples.

In the opening chapter of “Hatter’s Castle”by A. Cronin the warm spring breeze in April passes through the various districts of the town of Levenford where the action is set. This description takes up the larger part of the page and ends with these lines: “Then, as it / the breeze - V. B. / drifted carelessly along the decorous thoroughfare which led from this genteel region to the ajacent open country suddenly it chilled as it struck the last house in the road.

Why the warm breeze should suddenly “chill” when striking this house is the question to be answered on finishing the reading. Yet, even in the course of reading, “the singularity of the dwelling” in question gives one a vague suspicion that there must be something wrong about this house.

In E. Hemingway’s “Indian camp” /32/ the young husband who had injured his foot with an axe has to keep his bed while his young squaw on the lower bunk beneath him is passing through the ordeal of a delayed childbirth not being able to have her baby for two days. When the Ceasarian has been successfully performed and both lives saved in unthinkable conditions, the skilled doctor says: “Ought to have a look at the proud father. They’re usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs! I must say he took it all pretty quietly”. Yet, the quiet is ominous. The poor fellow could not “outsuffer”his wife and cut his throat with a razor from ear to ear when he lost all hope for the joyfull finale.

Chapter V in J. Galsworthy’s “The man of Property” /33/ is entitled “A Forsyte Menage”. It dwells on the interior richness of Soames’s house in London and contains a detail that Soames and Irene were seated at their dinner table “rectangularly”, so that the part of the table between them formed a triangle. The French “menage” and the triangle, for readers who know some French, will not fail to form an associative frame including the idiom “menage a trois”/ ironical for “husband, wife and lover”/, although Irene’s love affair with Bosinney in that chapter has not yet reached its dramatic point. In fact, it has just begun. But the anticipation of the ruinous blind alley is there.

M. Bulgakov’s “Master and Margaret” referred to above opens up with several misgivings too. Thus, before the reader learns that Woland predicted perdition to Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, Editor-in-Chief of the “Literary Magazine”whose head would presently be chopped off in a tram car accident, the author drops this hint to the disaster in store: “For a moment he / the satanic “foreigner”/ fixed his stare on the upper storey windows of the houses that were giving a dazzlingly broken reflection of the setting Sun which was bidding Mikhail Alexandrovich its last farewell”. This foreshadowing evokes an uneasiness similar to that of the previous examples /34/.

Such “Foregrounding through Backgrounding” does not at all rule out a possibility of the emotive shock technique being used on par with the logical emphasis at the meta-textual level. In Chapter One of “Master and Margaret”, again, we find this passage: “By the way, the first of the many strange things about that horrible evening in May must particularly be noted. There was not a single person to be seen anywhere: there were no people near the soft drinks booth, no people near the park’s alley that was running parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street”/35/, emph. mine-V. B. In fact, there is actually an interaction of some centrifugal forces divided between the fore- and backgrounding, yet, contrary to the laws of Physics or Mathematics, these diametrically opposite forces produce something that is definitely not a zero.

Returning to the contrast between the two different kinds of Foregrounding, one should note that its textual markers, unlike the meta-textual ones, depend on the recipient’s subjective reading or not reading them in into the text. They are typically presented as “obscurities” which may or may not awaken reflection, but if they do, they do it with a shock. The meta-textual markers are automatic and trivil as cliches. Even if such signals of emphasis are noticed and attended to, their effect may be as “lulling” as their absence. Whereas this paper which abounds in attention arresters / so far at least one per page / is very likely to put to sleep even a hungry Philologist / I’m hoping against hope that perhaps it would not be actually the case/, Raskolnikov’s dramatic philosophy in Dostoyevsky, or at least Agatha Christie’s entangled story making would keep even a post-Soviet capitalist revolution “nouveau”wide awake after his gorgeous dinner.

The “shock metaphor” is much closer to a scholastic definition of Foregrounding than its informational interpretations suggested by S. Levin, R. Riffaterre and others. In my opinion, it was V. B. Shklovsky /36/ who grasped the idea firmest of all when he wrote that the “estrangement” of things in art wants a writer employing some sofisticated form that might impede its perception by prolonging its effect, because the art’s perceptive aspect is its purport and therefore must have some duration in time. It was this remark by V. Shklovsky that later on paved the way for regarding Foregrounding in the light of modern Information Theory by S. Levin, M. Halliday and G. Leech.

Today, in the context of Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Studies and Hermeneutics we can further specify the idea of Foregrounding as a perceptive pause signal in reading which awakens reflection, the signal being either purely perceptive or mixed perceptive and cognitive.

Nevertheless, whatever the specifications might be, they would not yield an explanation of the dialectics of the subjective and the objective in the text reading comprehension. At the same time, this kind of dialectics is essential in resolving the antinomy of the universally anthropogenic and the subjectively idiosyncratic in forming the schemata. Neither can the antinomy be resolved by means of the “sibbolehtic” approach. As has already been noted above, “sibboleth”may characterize the auctorial / objective/ as well as the reader’s / subjective/ perception of emotive gradations.

Prof. I. V. Arnold, in a number of her publications on “Decoder Stylistics” /37/, /38/, /39/ undertook to somehow classify the types of Foregrounding among which she tells “coupling” after S. Levin /40/ from “convergence” after M. Riffaterre /41/, “defeated expectancy” after R. Jacobson /42/ from “strong position” after M. Halliday /43/ and “Salient Feature” after L. Spitzer /44/. Being welcome as any pigeon- holing which eventually can be found of some use when bringing chaos into system, it does not solve the problem either. Besides, on closer inspection, the types listed by I. V. Arnold / and their rubrics may go well beyond her list / give one the impression of belonging rather to “Coder” than “Decoder” Stylistics. All the forms listed are codes produced by the auctorial and not the recipient’s actualizations, which makes all the talk about the “addressee’s factor” in Decorder Stylistics nothing but talk.

Secondly, the very classification is logically not altogether faultless. There seems to be a violation of the Hierarchy Principle. “Strong Position” may be marked by any type of Foregrounding / not exclusively compositional as is generally believed/, Consequently, in relation to other types of Foregrounding, it is a generic term. As for “Salint Feature”, this is a specific functional value. It may be formed on the basis of any Foregrounding type as well provided it has been actualized by the reader.

The Theory of Salient Feature, too, was worked out by the Russian “Formalism” back in the early twenties and then was picked up by the French “New /old? / Criticism” /45/. But till this very day it has remained among the least investigated and the most debatable problems of Poetics. According to L. V. Surzhko /46/, today the notion of Salient /or Dominant / Feature is interpreted in three different ways: a/ as a creative principle of an individual author or some particular literary trend; b/ as a lexicographical marker of individual auctorial style / writer’s vocabularly /, and c/ as a motivational function of part in relation to its whole / a textual fragment to the rest of the text or one fragment to another/. My paper’s philosophy calls for this latter approach.

Being a functional-dynamic category of text perception which emerges at the moment of the text’s confrontation with the reader’s experience, Salient Feature alone is responsible for the reader’s semantisation of the text starting their schema by way of making themselves ask questions about the text’s obscurities as seen by them and none other. It is these obscurities that are the most “foregrounded” components so far as the readers personally are concerned. Salient Feature is a secondary actualization of the auctorial “herms” which remain for the reader non-actualized / virtual / unless their code coincides with the auctorial one, which is rather an exception to the rule than the rule itself. This is where Y. Lotman’s postulate about the reader’s retrieval of textual information depending on their understanding comes in /47/.

On the other hand, since the secondary Salient Feature actualization emerges on the basis of the author’s code and none other than the author’s, its interaction with the reader’s thesaurus when being convergent, resolves the antinomy of the subjective and the objective in the reading comprehention process.

The Salient Feature is not only a means of involving the reader into the Hermeneutic Cycle according to Leo Spitzer /48/, but also a factor imposing a limit to Interpretation Act, because it is, in the long run, a measure of textual wholeness that comes out when deviated from. The role of this measure had been metaphorically formulated by A. P. Chekhov long before the Theory of Foregrounding was evolved. The great writer once remarked that if, in the opening Act of a play, one can see a gun hanging on a wall, it must go off in the last Act. This fundamental principle of text cohesion / as it is seen today / laid down in a figurative sense should not be literalized by reducing the distance between the “triggering off” and the “shooting” to the exposition/ denouement frame. The distance can be either prolonged or shortened within any textual fragment as a wholeness all by itself, while its actualizing role will be played by the gun’s “misfire” when triggered or by “firing”without having been “triggered off”.

In other words, the norm prescribes that any suspense within the text or within the reader’s operative memory should be relieved, if it is not, then it is either a case of misreading, or the author’s intentional “backgrounding” of a frame element to make the reader restore it from their long-term memory, so that the textual “lacunae” will absorb the respective components of the reader’s thesaurus making it and the text read one functional totality. This results in what is habitually termed “The Principle of Incomplete Representation” in an image which actually describes the technique of the reader/ text interaction, or, in fact, the interaction of the information signals with their environment. The Polish science fiction writer Stanislav Lem had this to say about it: “No fiction text, nor any other, must be regarded as a self-sufficient value like, say, trees or stones. Material objects exist quite autonomously, whereas the semiotic systems which transmit information correlate with the people who make use of them. That explains why a literary work will always remain incomplete. This kind of “incompleteness” can only be replenished by the reading process...To make the long story short, one and the same book in different cultual enviroments, or in different social formations is significant in its own, different way, because its semantics becomes dependent on some particular kind of readership. I would like to refer to the replenishing of a literary work’s semantics by its readership at this or that historical period a perception which fixes this work’s semantics”/49/.

As for the problem of the number of suchlike suspense frames, it may be resolved by finding out those that are ultimately dominant in their own hierarchy, for among Salient Features may be found basic as well as the supporting and contributory ones.

The idea of the Salient Feature as a means of starting and finishing the hermeneutic rotation, and of its correlation with the types of Foregrounding makes it possible to tell between two of its kinds - perceptive and cognitive.

Perceptive “shocks” are produced mostly by deviant usages and compositional deviations from the “phoric” cohesive frames of the “trigger/fire” kind, that is anaphoric / cataphoric, or flashback/ foreshadowing, or prospection / retrospection cohesion signals. They are also provoked by the “shocking” deviations from the so-called “primitives” or “stereotypical scripts”in the various socio-cultural contexts that generate stories and personages from the conflicts between the various sets of values. There is, for instance, the stereotypical “bachelor” described by Ch. Fillmore /50/. Or “mother”, described by G. Lakoff /51/. The “right kind of bachelor” is a devil with the girls, hates nursing children and doing work about the house, and hangs around in bars and night clubs. If there is one that drinks only mineral water, nurses children and makes love to the only woman, he is the “wrong kind of bachelor”, but the right kind of Salient Feature. There is the stereotypical “sovok” tractor driver/52/ that may produce a similar shock when it clashes with the traditional image like this : “Two tractor drivers were returning late at night from a concert hall. Absorbed in discussing Musorgsky, they finally found themselves in the gutter” /from a newspaper/.

Yet, life is larger and more dynamic than stereotypes. It may produce situations where the present-day proverbial trivia like a dog biting a journalist will turn into events against the matter-of-fact journalist biting a dog, cf.:”Zubodralov /53/, an excavator operator, was digging for a gas pipe-line when, all of a sudden, his machine’s shovel struck against something hard. Great was his amazement when, contrary to the expectation of seeing a jar filled with gold pieces, he found a cobblestone instead”/ from a newspaper’s humorous page/. Returning, in this context, to the stereotypical “bachelor”, one may wonder how it can be applied to the exotic cultures of polygamy, monastic cellibacy or the present-day realities of divorce, long lived adulteries, bigamy, homosexuality or trans-sexual surgery.

Suchlike “incomplete representations” may be found in many other stereotypes described by G. Lakoff /54/. For a Lexicographer, this state of affairs is a stumbling block in trying to give the most adequate semantic description of a word. For poetic purposes, it is a benefit as a source of plot structural and topic variations.

As is typically the case with usage systems where deviations that become regular bring forth novel usages, the deviant stereotypes establishing themselves as behaviour models, produce new socio-cultural norms and values, and thereby the Salient Features return to the status quo of the original norm. Here one can see an analogy with research methods. D. Granin, a Soviet writer, remarked once on such an “extravagance”of science when a scholar, having obtained all the facts to prove his newly formulated hypothesis starts seeking to find those that testify to the contrary. These latter facts will alone yield some new information.

The models of Perceptive Salient Feature mentioned so far are closer to the objective rather than to the subjective factor of reading comprehension. They are a kind of explicit vehicles of the auctorial intention, and perhaps present the assets of scientific-technological revolution which has stunned our cerebral cortex with the suddenness and rigidity of contemporary enviromental disturbances. Hence V. Rozanov’s thirst for “brain concussions”.

The Salient Features’s cognitive status is its status of subjectivity. The reader’s subjective experience shows in their selective approach to ascribing or not ascribing functional significance to the information quanta in the auctorially foregrounded codes. Starting from different Salient Features as the tops of one and the same iceberg, different readers, having taken hold of different links in the logical chain of their schemata, just pull the chain out in Sherlock Holmes’s manner and meet in “The Square of Understanding”at the junction of the different question / answer streets by which they had arrived there.

No distinction is drawn, in this travel, between ordinary readers who do not know much about Foregrounding or Salient Features, and the professionals / students of Philology and critics / whose duty it is to know. The only difference is that the latter are in a bad need for the “uttered” schema to teach the former ones how to read without uttering it. One does not have to be an engineer to drive their car properly or understand anything about how “the box” works while pushing its controls to enjoy a TV show or play a video. To paraphrase the popular saying, those who can - do, and those who teach know how and why. To enact the schema for philological purposes, one has merely to “voice” the questions / answers in the professional jargon called “the proper metalanguage”.

The Cognitive Salient Feature is a field of confrontation between the auctorially foregrounded and the reader’s codes, a kind of “black holes” or “lacunae” in the semantic dimension of the text. That is why one of the most essential properties of this Feature is its ability to provoke a need for grasping and conceptualizing those “backgrounded” obscurities in the text that are, for every individual reader, the most dominant fragments marking off the start and the finish, the “on” and “off” buttons to operate the schema. These fragments and passages cause misunderstanding by defying the common sense and clashing with the experience of the reader. Misunderstanding provokes asking which is a testimony of good mental condition. The fact that the “Sovok” Pedagogy has for years been knocking the want of asking out of the pupils’ heads caused much trouble in the post-Soviet Higher School as well. Although, in his time, the “Leader of the World Proletariat” remarked that one fool may ask so many questions a dozen wise men couldn’t possibly answer, that is hardly ever the case. On the contrary. Blithering idiots, as a rule, will keep silent. Some of them because they think they know and are happy about their omniscience. Others - simply for fear of betraying their ignorance. Yet, either type is equally dangerous, the former as potential ignoramuses among those ruling the country, and the latter as the ones that have the inferiority complex which, as History teaches, paves the way for the various versions of Fascism.

Since “philological analysis” is enacted by “voicing”questions and answers about the text under analysis, the present-day Hermeneutics regards Text Interpretation as “uttered reflection”.

Behind every joke there is a core of truth. Such is the Principle of Grotesque. One can even find grotesques which parody the “voicing”of the schemata. A good example to both make my point in this paper clearer and to demonstrate, in an exaggerated form, a pattern of Text Interpretation for Teaching Purposes starting from the Salient Features, is this piece of rhymed gibberish:

Whether this “opus magnum” makes any sense is difficult to say unless a glimpse of mixed recognition and surprise lights up in the reader’s eye on learning that it translates into a police Inspector’s report to the following effect:

Both texts are translated from Karel Chapek’s humorous story “The Poet” /56/. A modernist who, like the victim of the traffic accident described, got tipsy, and was the only witness with a slip of paper in his hands where he had scribbled down his impressions of what happened while fresh in his memory, but following his “free associations”, must give evidence at the police station. It is, naturally, expected that modernistic associations, particularly those assisted by Bacchus, should be as wild as can be. Yet the “wildness” somehow gives way to system when the texts are correlated as a kind of monolingual translation, or “transcoding”. It so happens because associations have their own logic according to which the Inspector’s interrogation of “the poet” presents a full “voicing” of schema as might be performed by a good student of Philology.

Thus, the “lining up” of the houses / why? / suggests the only straight avenue in Prague which is known as “Zhitnaya” Street / background knowledge component/. “The virgin blushes”/where does virginity come in ?/ is the early morning. Next, what about “Singaporing?” Ah, that! To be sure, it associates metonymically with the brown-skinned Malayas who live there, and through them - with the colour of the car that caused the accident. Was it actually a racer that was being “raced”? No idea what kind of car it was, the fact is that it was “raced” to escape from the mess. As for the “tulip” that was “mauled down to dust” - isn’t it too much of a good thing to call a beggarly old hug? It isn’t, for “the poet” can’t afford anything but the flowery metaphor to name a woman whatever or whoever she might be / stylistic component/. The rest has been promoted to this paper’s epigraph as the image of the car’s number which is 235 /”swan’s neck” for “2”, “heaving breasts” for “3” if viewed horisontally, “drum-and-sticks”, with a certain stretching the point - for “5”/. It is perhaps this image that is the most obscure passage and the most “salient” out of all Salient Features in this poem, the rest of them being the car’s route to Singapore, the dawn playing the mandoline etc. All these suggestive points are just those which, according to the story, the Inspector’s questions were centered around.

The difference between the laws of association and the principles of categorial thinking is that the former are unpredictable but motivated post factum, while the latter are both predictable and therefore logically motivated. That explains the important problem why different readers wake up to reflection provoked by different Salient Features arriving, at the same time, at some “common denominator” of understanding within certain interpretative freedom of variation. This very factor provides for a broad individual variability of schemata within the invariant model of a cognitive process that has been schematically, in a reduced and exaggerated manner, illustrated in K. Chapek’s parody.

The basis for the laws of associative thinking is provided by the Theory of Prototypes one of whose versions has been worked out by G. Lakoff /57/. Considering categorization processes in some exotic languages, G. Lakoff, among many other things, focussed his attention on the “hon” classifier in Japanese. This classifier is used with the names of long, thin and straight objects. At the same time, he found out quite a number of exceptions to this rule where the classifier was not motivated by the respective realia. These are, for instance, some of the combat sports, base-ball, cinema, rolls of rope and reels of tape and wire, telephone conversations and injections. Nevertheless, arranging the respective names into associative series /mostly metonymical and metaphorical / gives a firm and very transparent motivation. Thus, many combat games are played with sticks which are long and straight, and those that don’t prescribe their use / like judo and others / motivate their names’ classifier on the analogy with those that do. Base-ball is played with a bat which is a kind of a stick; rope, wire, tape, film etc. may all be unrolled into a straight length of material, injections are made with a needle which is long and straight, telephone communication, like any other kind of communication, is associated with the idea of a long and straight channel etc., etc.

Now, it seems that “straightening” the entangled members of categorial sets up to their motivation bases /”prototypes”/, as is seen in the case of the “hon” classifier motivated by the image of “thinness” and “straightness”, reminds one of “straightening up” the entangled Salient Features and “unpacking” thereby conceptual signifiers, encoded in works of fiction. In either case, the Theory of Prototypes shows us that there are two mutually consolidating kinds of associative values: the centripetal /paradigmatic/ one that motivates the central prototypical concept through the elements of its categorial sets, and the circuit one / syntagmatic/, that is an association that links up one element of the set with another in a series, or, in other words, provides for a contextual motivation of one Salient Feature by another in discourse, as seen in the picture.

The objective aspect of auctorial code produced by Chapek’s “poet” is quantation of reality /58/, that is the time, the place and the victim of the accident, the number, colour and speed of the car that caused it. Potentially, the reader’s Dominant Feature may materialize from many of the quanta listed as its prototype, which will represent the subjective aspect of reading comprehension conditioned by the reader’s thesaurus.

At the same time, the circular association between the Dominant “a”, “b”, “c”, “d” etc. /see the picture/ will rescue the schema in case of “misfire” in the associative chain of decoding and its failure in this or that centripetal direction “a-C”, “b-C”, “c-C” etc. In that case, the reader may choose to return to the starting Dominant “a” or any other circular point “b”, “c”, “d” etc. to resume their movement to “C” and so on until the prototypical concept “C” is reached, whence the image of the streets converging in the square / see above /.

Now, it must be noted that the “poet’s” interrogation by the Inspector as described in Chapek’s parody takes place exclusively on the level of the so-called “content-factual” information that can be obtained from his “masterpiece” /59/. Police are mostly interested in facts, not in how the facts are pictured in the poetic figments of imagination. Nevertheless, similar procedures may be applied to content-conceptual information too. Here there are hierarchies of Dominants as well, and they are associated with the content factual ones. For instance, the deviation from the stereotypical “tractor driver” in the “micro-story”above is perceived as such merely factually : “oddly enough , intellectuals can be found even among the Kolkhoz tractor drivers”. Yet, at the conceptual level this information is dialectically cancelled. On the contrary, the stereotypical norm is made all the more spectacular by the ironic reference to a drunken scuffle that happened on the way back from the pub after an exchange of “compliments”. The signal to switch over to the conceptual information level, or Cognitive Salient Feature is the vagueness of motivating the “discussion’s” outcome, wich results in seeking for contrastive associations between a “concert hall” and a “pub”, or between “discussing composers” and “swearing”.

In the case of Chapek’s parody its conceptual-aesthetic value consists in its grotesque nature, although this nature does not show itself at the level of factual information: “here’s what real modernism is like!” Such literal misreadings of parodies are not exceptional even among most intelligent critics or Philologists, to say nothing of ordinary readers, particularly those whose tastes had been formed by the “Sovok” primitives of the “Socialist Realism” remaining as a detrimantal hang-over till this very day. The signal to switch over to the Cognitive level in Chapek’s case is a seemingly unmotivated metaphor that provoked the Inspector’s baffled question as to why “the poet” chose to refer to the drunken beggarly slut as “the tulip” /see above/.

It seems, then, that the Cognitive Salient Features dominate at the content-conceptual information level, whereas perceptive ones - in the field of content-factual information. This reveals one more distinction between the two kinds of Salient Features.

Students of Foreign Languages and Philology in the CIS countries who fail to see that the uttered schemata of fiction text analysis cannot be duplicated have a booming demand for them, particularly during the testing and examination periods. In trying to meet the demand, many responsive teachers who firmly believe that it would be a benefit, are ready to feed into the willing minds of their “pets” dozens of fragmentary meta-textual trivia and cliches which are supposed, in their opinion, to help them pass their tests in Text Interpretation with flying colours and facilitate the brilliance of that foreign language which they major in. The current samples of this flowery rhetoric may run something like this: THE AUTHOR’S STYLE IS CLEAR AND ELEGANT / ADEQUATE /, or THE NARRATIVE IS SUBTLY BLENDED WITH THE REPORTED SPEECH OF THE HERO, or SUCH and SUCH PROBLEM IS TACKLED BY THE AUTHOR WITH A PENETRATING PSYCHOLOGICAL INSIGHT, or N’s PORTRAIT HAS BEEN SKETCHED OUT IN THIN BUT SHARPLY POINTED BRUSHWORK and things like that. As a minimum for the class bottom or those who suffered from the course of Literature at the Secondary School, are offered guidelines like THIS IDEA RUNS THROUGH THE WHOLE STORY or even THE AUTHOR WANTS TO SHOW...

If the students’ “foreign tongues” are enough loosened, then they may well “pull” suchlike jabber “over” any text they’d never set their eyes on in the Benderian manner claptrapping Oukhudshansky’s reports /60/ and pass their test excellently. But why this kind of a triumph has nothing to do with Text Interpretation and has much more to do with keeping the ball rolling in the small talk about fashionable books at ladies’ salons - many either can not, or wouldn’t want to, admit.

Some readers of this paper would perhaps object by saying that suchlike practices are welcome at least in the noble cause of bringing up real young ladies and gallant gentlemen with proper speaking manners. True, one could comply with this kind of a suggestion and even try to keep up with the pressing demands of “market economy”, because the slogans in question tend to fascinate ordinary people with their exotic mysteriousness and thereby serve to advertise the post-expiery-date goods in the bookshops. As can be gathered from one of the stories by Stephen Leacock, having branded one and the same reading matter with different labels depending on the season and even the looks of a customer, one can easily and surely make best sellers out of any rotten stuff /61/. All this would have been gladly welcome, had it not been for the imminent danger of turning the passages like these into an antidote against reflection taken as “dummy interpretation” and mistaken for “philological analysis”. What to do to make the producers of this stuff realize its poisonous effect has partly been the point of the present notes.

Yet, all the same, there is no dissuading those most stubbornly of this corporation who still firmly believe that the small talk about the “philological analysis” is the philological analysis itself. In that case, I have some news for them, as the saying goes, to remind them of what a German Philosopher who has now gone out of fashion once wrote: you may choose to call a broomstick a mammal, but it wouldn’t help growing mammary glands on it /62/.

1. Here and below translations into English are all mine /V. B. / For the Russian version of this epigraph see note 55.

2. Kovbasenko Y. I. Shibolety kak sredstvo vyrazenija gradacii priznaka i filologiceskij analiz xudozestvennogo teksta // Jazyk i kultura. Proceedings of the Second International Conference. - Kiev: Ukr. Inst. of Foreign Relation Press, 1993. - P. 118-125.

3. In the CIS countries this discipline is part of philological training at Universities and Foreign Languages Institutes, and is entered in their curricula.

4. This novel, like some other works by Mikhail Bulgakov, was banned from teaching Soviet Literature under totalitarian rule for ideological reasons, and now is broadly recognized and appreciated for its idea of creative freedom and self-sacrifice. In it, there is a clear allusion to Dr. Faustus’s problem. The personages taking part in the scene referred to are Prof. Woland / Satan/ and his assistants Azazello and the speaking cat Hippo so nicknamed for his abnormal size.

5. Translated from: “Сеанс окончен! Маэстро! Урежьте марш!” /Булгаков М. Мастер и Маргарита// Москва. - 1966.- № II. -С. 82.

6. Translated from: “Ополоумевший дирижер, не отдавая себе отчета в том, что делает, взмахнул палочкой, и оркестр не заиграл, и даже не грянул, и даже не хватил, а именно, по омерзительному выражению кота урезал какой-то невероятный, ни на что не похожий по развязности своей марш.”

7. Lingvistika i filologija izmen’onnyx sostojanij soznanija // Referativnyj zurnal “Socialnyje i gumanitarnyje nauki”. Otecestvennaja Literatura. Serija 6 “Yazykoznanije”. - 1993. №. 2. -P. 21-35.

8. In the Soviet-made film “Seventeen Moments of Spring” about Colonel Isayev - the Russian agent in Fascist Germany / Shtirlits/, his radio-operator Katya /Frau Kinn/ is pregnant and must be taken to a German maternity hospital where she betrays her identity in childbirth by screaming in Russian.

9. In the Russian original Hippo uses the dialectal “урезать” which is a mixture of the Ukrainian prefix “у” and the Russian stem “резать” / the Russian “врезать”/.

10. For speakers of Russian, for instanсe, it does not take Prof. Higgins to tell a Caucasian the moment he or she utters the word “дэвюшька” / the distorted Russian for “девушка”, a girl or a young woman/.

11. Shaw, B. Pygmalion. A Comedy. - Moscow: Foreign Languages Publ. House, 1959. - P. 115.

12. Garvin P. L. /Ed. and Transl. / A Prague School Reader on Aesthetics, Literary Structure and Style. - Washington, 1958.

13. Halliday M. A. K. The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. - London, 1964. - P. 112.

14. Leech G. N., Short M. N. Style in Fiction. A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. - London: Longman, 1981. -P. 139.

16. Riffaterre M. Criteria for Style Analysis //Word. - Vol. 15. - №. 1, April, 1959.

17. Jacobson R. Linguistics and Poetics // Style in Language. The M. I. T. Press, 1966.

18. Arnold I. V. Znacenije silnoj pozicii dl’a interpretacii xudozestvennogo teksta. //Inostrannyje jazyki v skole. - 1978. - № 4. - P. 23-31.

19. Arnold I. V. Interpretacija anglijskogo xudozestvennogo teksta. A Lecture in English. - Leningrad: A. I. Herzen Ped. Inst. Press, 1983. - P. 6-14.

20. Arnold I. V. Stilistika sovremennogo anglijskogo jazyka / stilistika dekodirovanija/. - Moscow: Prosvescenije Publ., 1990. - P. 62-74.

21. Zherebkina I. A. O strukture rozanovskogo teksta / tekst nasilija/ / Callegium. - 1993. - № 2. -P. 21-28.

22. Rozanov V. V. L’udi lunnogo sveta. Metafizika xristianstva. - St. Petersburg, 1911. - IX.

23. Rozanov V. V. V mire nejasnogo i neresonnogo. - St. Petersburg, 1914. -P. 64.

25. Arnold I. V. O vozmoznosti ispolzovanija pon’atija kvantovanija v stilistike // Voprosy anglijskoj kontekstologii. - Vologda: Vologda Ped. Inst. Press,1974. - P. 3-11.

26. Alexandrov A. A. O cisfinite / “prikosnovenii k nul’u”/ Daniila Xarmza // Jazyk i kultura. Proceedings of the first International Conference. - Kiev: Ukr. Inst. of Foreign Rel. Press, 1992. - P. 152.

27. Peshkovsky A. M. Objektivnaja i normativnaja tocki zrenija na jazyk // A. M. Peshkovsky. Izbrannyje trudy. - Moscow: Ucpedgiz Publishers, 1959. - P. 50-62.

28. Shcherba L. V. O trojakom aspekte jazykovyx javlenij i ob eksperimente v jazykoznanii // L. V. Shcherba. Jazykovaya sistema i recevaja d’ejatelnost’. - Leningrad: Nauka Press, 1974. - P. 24-39.

29. They say that L. V. Shcherba concocted this nonsense to illustrate what grammatical meaning is to a class of his students. His sentence “Glokaja kuzdra steko budlanula bokra i kurd’acit bokr’onka” is supposed to render the idea that some female being /”kuzdra”/, having done something to a different male being in some manner /”steko budlanula bokra”/ is doing some other thing to the latter’s cub /”i kurd’acit bokr’onka”/.

30. Katsnelson S. D. Tipologija jazyka i recevoje myslenije. - Leningrad: Nauka Press, 1972.

31. Cronin A. Hatter’s Castle. - Moscow: Foreign. Lang. Publ. House, 1960. - P. 20.

32. Hemingway E. Indian Camp //Modern American Short Stories . - Moscow: Foreign,

33. Galsworthy J. The Man of Property // The Forsyte Saga I. - Moscow: Foreign Lang. Publ. House, 1956. - P. 105.

34. Булгаков М. Мастер и Маргарита// Москва.-1966.- № II. - С.10.Translated from: “Он остановил взор на верхних этажах, ослепительно отражающих в стеклах изломанное и навсегда уходящее от Михаила Александровича солнце...”.

35. Translated from:”Да, следует отметить первую странность этого страшного майского вечера. Не только у будочки, но и во всей аллее, параллельной Малой Бронной улице, не оказалось ни единого человека”.

36. Shklovsky V. B. Iskusstvo kak prijom // Poetika. - Petersburg, 1919. - P. 105.

45. Chernov I. Xrestomatija po teoreticeskomu literaturovedeniju. - Tartu, 1976.

46. Surzhko L. V. K Probleme interpretacii xudozestvennogo teksta // Jazyk i kultura. Proceedings of the First International Conference. - Kiev: Ukr. Inst. of Foreign Rel. Press, 1992. - P. 134.

47. Lotman Y. M. Struktura xudozestvennogo teksta. - Moscow: Iskusstvo Press, 1970. - P. 33.

49. Quoted and translated from: “Литературный текст, как и всякий прочий, не самостоятелен, как, скажем, деревья или камни; материальные предметы существуют совершенно объективно, сами по себе, а знаковые системы, передающие информацию, соотносятся с людьми, которые ими пользуются. Поэтому литературное произведение всегда неопределенно, и эту его “неопределенность” восполняет лишь процесс чтения... Говоря коротко, одна и та же книга в различных культурных средах, т. е. в разных исторических формациях, значит не одно и то же, поскольку в своей семантике вступает в зависимость от данного множества читателей. Доопределение совокупности смыслов литературного произведения читателями в конкретный исторический период я называю восприятием, стабилизирующим семантику произведения”/ Мороховский А. Н., Воробьева О. П., Тимошенко З.В. Стилистика английского языка.- Киев: Выща. школа, 1991. - С. 15./.

50. Fillmore Ch. Towards a Descriptive Framework for Special Deixis // Speech, Place and Action / Ed. by Jarvella & Klein.- Lnd., J. Wiley, 1982.

51. Lakoff G. Classifiers as a Reflection of Mind // Noun Classes and Categorization / Ed. by C. Craig. Amsterdam, 1986.

52. Notorious for drunken rowdyism, ignorance, profane talk and being aggressive. “Sovok” / punning on “Soviet” and “spade”/ is prefixed to anything reminiscent of the Soviet Establishment’s vices.

55. Translated from: “Дома в строю темнели сквозь ажур, / Рассвет уже играл на мандолине./ Краснела дева. В дальний Сингапур/ Вы уносились в гоночной машине./ Повержен в пыль надломленный тюльпан./ Умолкла страсть./ Безволие.../ Забвенье/ О шея лебедя! / О грудь! / О барабан и эти палочки - / трагедии знаменье!”

56. Чапек, Карел. Поэт // Избранное.- Кишинев: Картя Молдовеняскэ, 1874.- С. 456-462.

59. On differentiating between the “content-factual” and “content-conceptual” information see: Galperin I. R. Tekst kak object lingvisticeskogo issledovanija.- Moscow: Nauka Press, 1981.

60. Ostap Bender - pioneer of early Soviet racket, notorious for his “four hundred ways” of making dirty money with clean hands. Much admired and quoted Hero in “Twelve Chairs” and “The Gold Calf”, a satirical dilogy by I. Ilf and E. Petrov parodying Soviet ways in the 20 s. The novel was banned under Stalin’s rule and regained its popularity during N. Khruschev’s ideological “thaw”. In the episode alluded to, O. Bender sold several cliches for making topical reports on festive occasions to an incompetent journalist whose speaking name derives from the Russian verb “uxudљat’”/ to make worse/. Ostap called his cliches “festive packages”.

61. Leacock, Stephen. The Reading Public: A Book Store Study// Perfect Lover’s Guide and Other Stories. - Moscow: Foreign Lang. Publ. House, 1958. - P. 144-122.

62. I hope my free translation of F. Engels’s “shoe- brush” into “broomstick” /in “Antidьring”/ will be excused for rhetoric’s sake.