Linguistic Analysis of a Literary Text as the Key to its Comprehension: Cognitive and Discoursive Aspect

Abstract

Structural and semantic linguistics has accumulated colossal experience in the systematization of language units, the relationships between them, has formed a unified view of the language as a complex system. Cognitive and discursive paradigm in linguistics has made it possible to explain linguistic and speech characteristics with the context and attracted the cognitive nature of the linguistic sign as a full-fledged component of analysis. Transferring the idea of anthropocentrism to the figure of the second participant in communication, it came to the conclusion that the last component plays large role in the communicative interaction between addresser - text - addressee, and that the interpretive potential of the text depends on the cognitive abilities of this addressee and his discursive baggage. In the/given article the listed characteristics of the state of modern linguistics made it possible to try to identify an interdependent relationship between the structural and semantic characteristics of language units selected by the author of a literary text from the arsenal of the language and woven into its syntagmatics, and the cognitive and discursive «subtext» that linguistics extracts from the text, which helps expose the author’s intentions more clearly. The material for the analysis made fragments of works by the classical Russian literature authors (I.A. Bunin, I.A. Goncharov, M.M. Prishvin, A.P. Chekhov), structural and semantic analysis was used as a leading method, supplemented with elements of content and discourse analysis. The novelty of the research lies in the desire to make a linguistic analysis of the speech canvas of a literary text in the context of new explanatory «horizons» that have opened up due to the cognitive-discursive paradigm. The study of the linguistic «details» of specific fragments of literary texts has shown that the interpretation of a literary text is based on the characteristics of linguistic units (morphemes, words, word forms, syntactic constructions, CSI, etc.) described in detail within the framework of the structural and semantic paradigm, expanding the view of the contextual environment (in this case - already broad context) allows introduce into the interpretation arguments that depend on the interpreter’s own reading and within his value system.

Keywords

• structural and semantic characteristics of linguistic units
• syntagmatics
• cognitive and discursive subtext