Записки з романо-германської філології (Apr 2015)
Museum catalogue as a polycode text
Abstract
The article suggests the author’s interpretation of communicative unity of a picture reproduction and its text annotation in a museum catalogue as a type of polycode text. The point of code transformations is investigated as well as the point of communicative posteriority of iconic and verbal messages. Communicative activity of a catalogue user is treated as transitivity of addressee-reader’s and addressee-on-looker’s roles. This publication is devoted to a new perspective in our study of polycode messages in different functional styles. At this time, the object of our research is a specific communicative phenomenon: the article of a museum catalogue (of an art gallery) as the unity of the reproduction of a picture and a verbal (i.e. English) text annotation containing the information about the represented picture and its author. As the subject of study we chose the semiotic relationships of two thematically united multimodal messages: iconic (picture) and verbal (annotation). Following Ch.Morris we interpret painting as "a set of signs" created "to display and preserve what is dear to people". The combinations of colours and lines on the surface of the canvas / paper has a two-dimensional static sign integrity, which "pulls" the viewer into an imaginary three-dimensional depth of the dynamic world depicted by the artist. Accordingly, a picture is understood by us as a semiotic phenomenon as an iconic message, reproducing a non-semiotic reality. A verbal message using the signs of other code (language code) also provides information about the externality of its reality. In our case this information largely concerns pictures, the description of their meaningful and formal characteristics. The focus of our attention in the discussion of semiotic features of the article of a museum catalogue as a single communicative unit is also drawn to the questions of communicative posteriority. Under communicative posteriority we understand the reproduction in a message of such a referent, which in itself is a communicative phenomenon, or a protomessage. In this study, we are interested in the relationship between a protomessage and its communicatively posterior reproduction. By this we mean the following. Firstly, the relationship between the actual scenic canvas (we treat it as an iconic protomessage) and its catalogue photographic reproduction (we treat it as a posterior reproduction of the original by means of an identical, in this case also iconic code). Secondly, it is the relationship between an iconic protomessage (scenic canvas / reproduction) and its descriptive, verbal (communicatively posterior) reproduction in a verbal text by means of a different, not iconic, but a language code.
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