A.A.Marchyshyna notes on text interpretation

(a manual for graduate students)

Kamianets-Podilskyi

2011

Contents

Text Interpretation as a Branch of Linguistic Studies ……………...	3
Types of Text. Text Categories …………………………………….	4
Plot of a Literary Work …………………………………………….	10
System of Literary Images …………………………………………	14
Narration in Fiction ………………………………………………...	19
Message and Toning of a Fiction Text ……………………………..	24
Seminars ……………………………………………………………	28

Text Interpretation as a Branch of Linguistic Studies

1. The concept of text interpretation.

2. Approaches to text definition.

Interpretation is the process establishing, either simultaneously (known as simultaneous interpretation) or consecutively (known as consecutive interpretation), oral or gestural communications between two or more speakers who are not able to use the same set of symbols. By definition it is available as a method only in those cases where there is a need for interpretation – if an object (of art, of speech, etc.) is obvious to begin with, it cannot draw an interpretation. In any case the term interpretation is ambiguous, as it may refer to both an ongoing process and a result.

Interpretation is a term used in informal education settings to describe any communication process designed to reveal meanings and relationships of cultural and natural heritage through first hand involvement with an object, artifact, landscape or site. This is primarily known as heritage interpretation.

An interpretation can be the part of a presentation or portrayal of information altered in order to conform to a specific set of symbols. This may be a spoken, written, pictorial, mathematical, sculptural, cinematic, geometric or any other form of language. The purpose of interpretation would normally be to increase the possibility of understanding.

Interpretation crisscrosses cognitive theory and provides explaining and commenting on the meaning, thus it is oriented on the language in its dynamics, i.e. speech.

The term “text” is used referred to different spheres of life thus it possesses a set of dictionary definitions representing usually a single narrowed meaning.

Text (Lat. textus – to weave, construct, compose) has multiple meanings depending on the context of its use:

In language, text is a broad term for something that contains words to express something.

In linguistics a text is a communicative act, fulfilling the constitutive and regulative principles of textuality. Both speech and written language, or language in other media can be seen as a text within linguistics.

In literary theory a text is the object being studied, whether it be a novel, a poem, a film, an advertisement, or anything else with a semiotic component. The broad use of the term derives from the rise of semiotics in the 1960s and was solidified by the later cultural studies of the 1980s, which brought a corresponding broadening of what it was one could talk about when talking about literature. In this respect it may relate to the corresponding term “discourse”.

In academics, text is often used as a short form for textbook.

In communicative linguistics, text is a verbal record of a communicative event.

The difference in understanding of text in linguistics and literature studies lies in the approach to its analysis. In literature studies it is considered to be an aesthetic phenomenon, in linguistics it is a verbal object.

We have to know that an object becomes the one (an object) when it suffers from some activity directed on it.

A subject is some component, side, aspect of the object; it’s a point of view from where the object is seen.

So it may be concluded that literature studies and linguistics analyze the same object but different subjects.

So, text interpretation focuses on the revealing of the content the author had inserted into the text. The interpretation of texts began as early as ancient Greece, in the time of the early philosophers and poets. By the time of Plato, in regards to education, studying the interpretation of Greek poetry was a foundation of learning.

The main task of text interpreting as a research is to draw as much information from the text as possible, but not to cross the limit of interpretation.

There are 3 things that allow interpretation to occur, and these are all interlinked and interdependable. These 3 factors are the writer, the text and the reader. Through the act of interpretation the reader is the person creating meaning, and the writer’s original intended meaning is often overlooked or ignored. It is the reader who produces meaning by participating in a complexity of socially constructed and enforced practices. From this, interpretation produces values and meanings that are outcomes of an active process and that the process always occurs within specific cultural and political contexts and has a direct link to the world that the reader lives in.