Author’s Stance in the Fiction “Frame” Staging: Pragmatic and Semantic Aspects

Abstract

The article examines the author’s stance in the fiction “frame” staging that contributes to the expression of the main intentions of the author and determines the direction of the meanings decoding in the text space. The relevance of the research is due to the growing interest in modality in recent decades as a communicative, pragmatic and semantic category that determines the linguistic and stylistic features of a literary text and manifests components of the author’s “picture of the world”. The purpose of the article is to identify and describe the pragmatic and semantic features of the author’s stance in the fiction “frame” staging. The research methods are applied to the object of research in a comprehensive manner, with the priority choice being the transformation method, the deductive and inductive method, the pragma-semantic analysis of modal linguistic units of multi-level affiliation, contextual analysis, and the method of philological interpretation. The functioning of the authorial stance is conditioned by a complex of author’s intentions, both explicit and implicit. The inclusion of the narrative about the events of a person’s life in the fiction “frame” staging allows us to interpret such events as universally symbolic. In the course of the research, it was found that the “frame” of the story “Hadji Murad” by L.N. Tolstoy is characterized by the active use of the pronoun I in the implementation of the narrative in the first person, which contributes to the creation of near and far perspectives of the text; introductory words, verbs of thought, memories and recognition act as markers of the authorial stance; landscape descriptions also realize the aesthetic function, organized antithetically. The actualization of the author’s stance in the fiction “frame” staging occurs on the basis of the correlation of the meanings of framed and framing texts, which allows us to identify the abstracting nature of the “frame” as a compositional component: its main function is not so much the reader’s emotional attitude towards the main text “inserted” into this “frame”, as a reflection of the author’s attitude to problems and ideas implicated in the semantic space of a literary text.

Keywords

• author’s stance
• semantics
• pragmatics
• the fiction “frame” staging
• author’s intentions
• decoding of meanings
• reader’s interpretation