Introduction to text linguistics. Учебное пособие

That is why, speaking of intertextuality, one should remember that its range in a way depends on the extent of the reader’s knowledge, and the size of chronological gap between the author and the addressee. Intertext becomes a “filter” that separates an educated reader from a “common” one, who may not even notice the elasticity created by intertextual links [1, P. 201].

Perhaps, another phenomenon should be mentioned here because of its similarity. It is called Precedent Text (term coined by U.N.Karaulov). He defines it as significant for an individual cognitively or emotionally, well known in the community or social group, the one that comes up regularly in this individual discourse [2, P. 12].

Such texts are easily recognized by native speakers, a person, who does not recognize them, cannot be considered a member of that culture. They are different in different national cultures, and they also change with time. In the Soviet Union quotations from films were widely spread, today they are being supplanted by advertisements. We also use quotations from books and poems we read and learnt by heart at school.

English language fiction and newspapers have been using Precedent texts to create titles and headlines for a long time. This is a form of a word game called Contamination or Transformation, when popular phraseological units, proverbs and other set phrases are employed to give the reader the idea what the text is about. They are often distorted, so they must be very widely familiar for the reader to recognize them. The extent of compressed information that can be extracted from these depends on the reader’s expertise.

But postmodernist innovations in writers’ oeuvres on the one hand, and development of computer technologies on the other, brought about a radically new kind of Text – Hypertext.

5.2. Hypertext as a peculiar kind of Text

Hypertext may be considered a method of communication in the community, where a person simultaneously receives multiple flows of multidirectional information they cannot embrace and internalize to a full extent. It was the so-called information explosion and information revolution that made it impossible to acquire the full amount of knowledge even about one topic. Neither can this information be rigidly structured, as

51

new knowledge keeps coming up all the time. To manage somehow this flow, information was arranged into a network of relatively independent clusters that may be united or separated in the course of producing and consuming information.And that is what we call Hypertext.

This notion first appeared as a term back in 1967 in a report by Nelson T.H. [3, P. 230] at the conference of American National Computer Association. The term was coined to describe the relations between texts in computer reality, when certain links had been established between them, these links were named hyperlinks. One could look for information moving from text to text until all necessary information was received. The links were not linear in character; the succession of moves was determined by the user’s choice. Of course works of fiction were not considered at all, the aim of hypertext being organizing information convenient for a user.

The concept of hypertextuality is often associated with the name of Julia Kristeva, but it was the concept of intertextuality that she introduced into linguistics. Still, she did study the hypertextuality problem quite actively, seeing it as text dynamics first and foremost. She considered hypertextuality to be a textual hyperaction taking place within every literary text [4, P. 327]. In her Semiotics published in late 1960s Julia Kristeva defines Hypertextuality as “text permutation” in the space of a literary text, several pieces taken from other texts, interacting and often neutralizing one another [4, P. 189].

Text turns out to be a certain combinatorial set, a place of constant multilayer mutual exchange among many fragments being redistributed again and again by the written speech; the text of a new work of fiction is created using many preceding texts that are demolished, denied and resurrected again. For Kristeva hypertextuality is not a result but an endless eternal process, text dynamics.

In her later work La Révolution Du Langage Poétique (1974) she develops the idea that hypertextuality is not imitation or a kind of reproduction. She describes it as transposition of one or several semiotic systems into a new semiotic system. [4, P. 15–16]. Kristeva contrasts Hypertextuality with Hypertext (an object).

Gérard Genette introduced this term into semiotics by considering Hypertextuality to be the fifth kind of Transtextuality. Transtextuality was the term Genette used to denote the text property of “transcedentality”.

52

This is the umbrella term for anything above the given text that includes it into the system the Belle-lettres literature as a whole [5, P. 39].

According to Genette the Transtextuality phenomenon includes five types of relations: architextuality, paratextuality metatextuality, intertextuality, hypertextuality.

Intertextuality may take the form of quotation, plagiarism, or allusion. Paratextuality is the relation between a text and its paratext, everything that surrounds the main body of the text, like titles, headings, and prefaces. Architextuality is the designation of a text of a certain genre or genres. Metatextuality is the explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another text. The text commented on may not be even mentioned. Finally, Hypotextuality / Hypertextuality is the relation between a text and a preceding hypotext; it is based on a text or genre but it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends it: for example, sequel, parody, spoof and translation. In information technology, Hypertext is the one that takes the reader directly to other texts [5, P. 34].

But in modern linguistics Hypertext is mostly considered as a method of non-linear text organizing, created on the basis of possible links. By following these links the parts of the text may be read in different sequences creating different linear texts [6, P. 29].

Afew words should be said about the property of Text Linearity.

5.3. Concept of Text Linearity

The concept of text linearity was defined long ago. It means that elements of oral speech appear as a sequence in time, whereas elements of written speech appear in space accordingly. The term “linear” means that in the absence of time limit or on the infinitely large sheet of paper speech appears to be a “line” – its formally equal elements follow one another. Thus we are talking about a unidimentional structure here.

It has repeatedly been pointed out that it is this feature of Speech and, consequently, Text that leads to discrepancy between the “author’s text” and “reader’s text”, as mental processes are not linear in their nature: the combination of utterance elements perceived by the addressee may differ considerably from what the addresser had in mind before he expressed it in oral or written form.

53

According to Cognitive Psychology data [7, P. 87], to be able to read and write linearly, a person has to be specifically taught to do so. If you listen to a four-year-old child reporting an amazing incident, you will see that linearity does not come naturally. The child immediately verbalizes the images stored in the memory, so much so, that an adult sometimes finds it impossible to understand what it is all about. It also happens to an adult person who has not received a proper education or training.

The nonlinear images exist in an adult’s memory too, but the addresser makes a lot of effort to be properly understood by structuring and organizing them to create a logical linear text before sending it to the addressee. The latter undertakes the reverse operation of transforming a linear text into non-linear ideas, triggering the appearance of discrepancies between them and the addresser’s ideas, sometimes these differences may be so vast that the act of communication is not achieved.

The equality of linear text elements exists only formally, and the linearity itself is not at all self-evident, if we take into consideration not just the form of the text, but its contents, too.

If we compare two vastly different kinds of texts like scientific and fiction, we will see that neither of them, strictly speaking, is linear in character, though the manner of their branching is radically different.

5.4. Hypertextuality of traditional texts

Scientific Text follows strict logic and is highly structured in form. This means that all information distracting the addressee from the main topic is provided beyond the main body of the text into page and end references that include referring the reader to the sources of information or quotes, the author’s important additional comments not directly connected with the main topic, etc. This destroys the formal text linearity, and in fact we deal with a hypertext the way it looks in a computer today – separate texts connected by hyperlinks.

In contrast, in Literary Text there are few, if any, formal references (links), and we mainly come across those in translated, not original, texts. But although formally literary text looks linear, it includes the author’s speculations, turns, inset stories, retardations both at the text and phrase levels, as well as intertextual phenomena – citation, allusion, etc.

54

Although ideas of Intertextuality and Hypertext are rather close, there is a substantial difference between them: Intertextual links are created by the author, while Hypertextuality offers freedom of links and associations.

Today Hypertext links have been detected in many functional styles, such as Official Documents Style, Style of Mass Communication and, naturally, Literary (Belle-lettres) Style.

With advancement of computer literacy the interest to the problem of Hypertextuality has grown considerably. Being a comparatively new notion and term, it has many definitions by different authors that stress its most important features according to relevant researchers:

Hypertext, or non-linear text, is a mechanism that allows to link elements of a text and move from one to the other [4].

Hypertext is a certain unit of information, whose units are several texts or one text with its parts connected not linearly, but by multiple links in multidimensional structure [5, P. 14].

Hypertext is a non-linear document that branches out and is interlinked, allowing the reader to study the information himself choosing the order of its presentation [8, P. 122].

We can easily see that these definitions basically describe the same properties, and their difference mostly lies in their form. The main idea is non-linear organization of the text.

This principle of text organization that Nelson described in 1967 has already existed for hundreds of years, but before the age of computers did not need a specific name.

The most obvious and spectacular example is the Bible, the numerous books of the Old and New Testament.

The Bible is not intended for linear continuous reading, like we do when we read literature today. Every verse is a self-contained SPU, and the reader often goes straight to the verse, not reading the previous or following verses. Each verse has a reference number, also there are references (links) to verses with similar content. This makes it possible to pick the parts depending on the reader’s choice.

Another age-old hypertext genre is a Scientific Text (treatise, article, dissertation, monograph). These also do not have to be read linearly. Moreover, in the course of the paper authors refer the reader to the sources they use, offer books for further reading, look up definitions in dictionaries

55

and make up their own glossary and index, include illustrations, tables, graphs, charts and other visual elements. The table of contents and the index enable the reader to choose the information they need and look at it in the order they need.

Also, many scientific text authors used to write notes on cards or sheets of paper, and then decide on the order these notes will appear in the text (converted hypertext into linear one.). Among fiction authors Nabokov used to construct his books using this method. Today computer made this process much easier and faster.

There are some traditional literary texts that are non-linear thanks to references inside it. Among the best known are Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) and Pale Fire by V.Nabokov. It must be mentioned that they both are often referred to as examples of intertextuality and hypertextuality that illustrates the immaturity of theoretic background of this problem.

5.5. Hypertext in the age of computers

Today the notion of Hypertext is usually associated with hyperspace created by information systems that make it possible creating complex and multidimensional links among text elements (Nodes). This results in nonvoluntary creation of multiple text interpretations, new layers and links through “the reader’s digital text fragments organizing” [9, P. 176].

Organizing fragments (they can be quite independent) in this manner may often be found in non-fiction texts, for example, dictionaries, where such links are instrumental to obtain the full amount of information about a unit under scrutiny, like a lexical unit. The extreme case of Hypertextuality is the answer to a search query on the Internet. Strictly speaking, it is not quite a traditional text, although it possesses many of its characteristics.As is well known, this answer may include hundreds of thousands of pages that are not directly connected with one another and are not a text in the traditional meaning of the word, as it is described in this book. But it illustrates very well that Hypertext is decentralized by its nature – none of these pages may be considered the main one.

Another fundamental difference between Hypertext and Intertextuality lies in the fact that the former is a kind of virtual reality, as is best seen in its electronic version, whereas for the latter the most important things are associations, images and symbols. The number of layers in Intertext, large

56

as it may be, is finite, but Hypertext, for all intents and purposes, becomes practically infinite. This is interpreted as unlimited semiosis of simulacra in hyperreality that inevitably gains the status of an only reality [10, P. 35]. But this problem goes beyond the scope of this book.

Hypertext may be divided into several main blocks and present in the form of a diagram (fig. 1).

Precedent texts

Fig. 1. Diagram of hypertext elements composition

The text created by the author is called Actual. The texts the actual text refers to and without knowing which the actual text can not be understood are called Pretexts. Usually the author presumes that the reader knows those texts, but in any case the reader may look them up to understand the actual text better.This part of Hypertext is controlled by the author.As to Posttexts, they are created by the reader, who already knows the Actual Text. These would be an abstract, critical analysis of the actual text, etc. They are also considered within the framework ofTextTransformationsproblem under the name of secondary texts, so they have to be given a quick look.

5.6. The Original Text and types of Secondary Texts

Problems of Text Transformation are dealt with by Applied Text Linguistics. The main idea of a Text Linguistics unit – the Texteme – may be realized in various forms – Allotexts. Allotexts are used as substitutes of the Original Text (Actual Text) under some peculiar conditions. They are partial equivalents of the Original Texts, therefore the problem of semantic equivalence of text variants arises, because the shorter the allotext is, the less semantic equivalence exists between it and the original text. With translation there is no shortening, so it is supposed to be fully equivalent to the original text. The degree of equivalence with the shortened translation may vary; abridgement is at least two times shorter than the original text, while the abstract of the article is usually 5–20 times

57

shorter than the original text. Other allotexts are even shorter. There is no direct relation between shortening and losing information of the original text, because shortening is achieved by condensing or omitting the least informative parts of the original text.

The concept of Primary and Secondary Texts in Applied Text Linguistics was borrowed from Information Science (Theory of scientific and technical information), where hallmark of primariness / secondariness is a ground for classification of Information documents.

In practice of documentation processing, translation or text appraisal it is also traditional to distinguish the Original (basic, source, primary) Text and the Secondary Texts. The secondary texts are produced by transforming the original text.

There are the following types of secondary texts: headings, query annotations, bibliographical descriptions, abstracts, summaries, translations and reviews. Modern methods, such as free coordinate indexation, are being used to process information in scientific and technical texts.

The main function of the Non-fiction text heading (title) is to express the main thematic content of the text in a shape of a complete sentence. The heading is expected to be short, precise, clear, simple and unique.

Sometimes this is done only partially or not at all. This phenomenon can be explained by lack of understanding the different role of a Bellelettre text title (to attract readers’attention) and that of other types of texts. It is more typical in Humanities, where the similarity with fiction texts is more pronounced.. In many cases this is caused by the author’s lack of experience and understanding of the heading functions.

Query annotation appears as a result of indexing, i.e. detecting the text main thematic content and expressing it as a set of Key Words. In general, a query annotation consists of 5–15 key words, which are carry the most significant semantic units in Content Text Structure. For example: linguistics, language history, Old English, vocabulary.

One of the most well-known transformations of the original text is translation. It is achieved as a result of rendering of the original text content in another language maintaining as far as possible the identity of meaning and peculiarities of presenting information in the original text. The next stage of this transformation is the shortened translation in which some unimportant parts of the original text are omitted.

58

Abridgement is the result of rendering the content of the original text in a shortened and more convenient form with maintaining the similar order of presenting information. Review is the result of rendering the main points of the original texts, with its critical appraisal.

Abstract (the summary) is produced by revealing the main content elements of the original text and expressing them in a short text (usually one paragraph) allowing to learn what is said in the original text. They usually precede the original text published in a scientific journal or almanac. Annotation reveals the main content elements of the original text and expressing them in a very short text (usually one sentence) displaying what the original text is concerned with. We may also view as secondary texts, or allotexts, such forms as bibliographic description, and subject description.

5.7. Modern approaches to defining Hypertextuality

Summing up the present-day views on Hypertexts, the following approaches may be singled out:

–from the functional point of view, it is a communication method that appeared in the society simultaneously receiving multiple flows of multidirectional information they cannot embrace and internalize by traditional methods;

–from the formal point of view, it is a non-linear text, whose order of reading is based on the readers decisions;

–from the ontogenetic point of view, there are two kinds: a) created by the auther who leaves it up to the reader to decide the order of reading and

b)created by the reader depending on their needs (usually on the Internet or in the electronic form);

–from the structural point of view, there are two kinds: a) existing within one text whose hubs are combined by the recipient and b) existing as a pretext, actual text and posttext, whose functions change, depending on what text should be considered actual;

–from the literary point of view, experimental writing method;

–from the Text theory development point of view, a logical progression of Intertextuality theory, the result of text permutation (Genette). Relations

59

between texts may be described as co-presence (citation, reference, plagiarism, allusion), or derivation (parody, harlequin travesty, pastiche).

Yet it should be stressed, that even today the majority of authors continue creating traditional generally linear texts.

Discussion and tasks

1.Name typical general text categories.

2.What phenomena are studied in Intertextuality theory?

3.What brought about identification of Hypertext as a separate kind of text?

4.Can we say Hypertext is the product of Internet age? Why?

5.Define linearity of speech and text.

6.Why does linearity of speech may bring about discrepancies between the addresser’s and addressee’s messages?

7.Define the terms:Actual text, Pretext, Posttext, Precedent text.

8.What are primary and secondary text?What is the difference between the terms “Original text”, “Actual text”, “Primary text”?

9.Analyze texts (Use your instructor’s choice, see Supplement 2 or choose your own from reliable native speaker sources.). Are there any features of intertextuality here?

10.Do they belong to any category described by terms in question 5?

References

1.Nathalie Piegay-Gros Introduction a L’lntertextualite Paris: Dunod, 1996. 186 p.

2.Караулов Ю.Н. Русский язык и языковая личность. М.: Наука, 1987. 261 с.

3.Nelson T. H. Getting it out of our system // Informational Retrieval: A critical Review; Ed.by G. Schechter Washington DC: Thompson Books.1967. 120 p.

4.Conklin J. Hypertext: an introduction and survey // Computer. 1987. Vol. 20. № 9.

5.Genette, Gérard Palimsestes: La littérature au second degré. (Poétique). Paris: Seuil, 1982. С. 76.

60