Category of Situationality in Narrative Model of Artistic and Legal Discourse

Abstract

The subject of research in this article is the specificity of the category of discursive situationality, which determined the problematics of the novel “Bleak House” by Ch. Dickens (1853). The purpose of the article is to build a typology of situationality (the situationality is prototypical, intertextual, intentional, coherent) and to identify the means of linguistic representation of the category of situationality in a text that functions in the conditions of interaction of two discourses — legal and artistic. Language techniques representing various types of situationality are divided into textual ones (“detention” technique, interruption of narrative angles, prolonged syntax, etc.), lexical-semantic ones, including a class of stylistic figures of speech (metaphor, precedent name, onomastic allusion, comparison, oxymoron, irony, sarcasm, emotive syntax, etc.) and style, reflecting the inclusion of elements of official business style in artistic speech (verbal nouns, verb-nominal combinations, etc.). Elements of the official business style of speech are expressed in the speeches of the characters during the interrogation, in court speeches, in the business correspondence of the heroes of the novel, and they are also fragmentarily woven into the author’s narrative (they are highlighted with quotation marks). The study emphasizes that the category of discursive situationality is manifested at all levels of the implementation of the narrative model of artistic and legal discourse.

Keywords

• artistic and legal discourse
• narrative model of artistic and legal discourse
• prototext
• category of situationality
• types of discursive situationality