8. implicitness and ambiguity of the fictional text

8. IMPLICITNESS AND AMBIGUITY OF THE FICTIONAL TEXT

The hierarchical organization o f the literary text determines the distinction o f its external and internal parts, the latter causing the emergence o f a hidden or implicit content. The analysis o f the implicit aspect o f the text helps to reveal new senses laid in the structure o f the text.

Implicitness is a text category which is defined as non­ verbally expressed information, as hidden or indirect expression o f a certain content based on the interrelations o f linguistic and extra- linguistic factors (background knowledge, cultural context, aims and intentions o f the adresser). The problem o f implicitness, its status, types and main units have always been in the focus o f the scholars’ attention. Implicitness is regarded as an inherent property o f a fictional text conveying indirect, hidden information that is to be inferred in the process o f text interpretation (Ashurova, 2012).
I.V. Ivankova differentiates the following types o f implicitness: hidden: a) in the context (in the same or neighboring paragraphs);

2. 
   in a broad context (in the other parts o f the same text); 2) in the cultural context (Иванкова, 2007:8). So, in the process o f decoding implicit information both linguistic and extralinguistic factors are equally relevant.
   

I.R. Galperin differentiates the following types o f information: content-factual, content-conceptual and content-subtextual. Factual information contains data about facts, events, actions, objects, ideas, etc. Factual information is explicit and therefore easily observed in the text. Conceptual information, being an essence o f literary communication, reflects the author’s conceptual world picture, his understanding o f the people’s social, economic, political and cultural life. Conceptual information depends both on factual and subtextual types o f information. Sub-textual information is o f an implicit character, it appears in the text due to the ability of linguistic forms to generate new senses on the basis o f connotative and associative links. The author outlines two types o f subtextual information: situational and associative. The situational subtextual information is based on intertextual links, activating in the reader’s mind certain knowledge structures connected with historical or literary facts and events. The associative information appears due to the ability o f human mind to correlate verbally expressed information with the individual’s accumulated knowledge and his social experience. This information is based on life experience, visual, auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic perception.
So, imphcitness is grounded on the mechanism o f
associations in the reader’s mind that allows him to correlate new information with the old one. As K.A. Dolinin notices, impli­ citness is interlinked with such particulars o f fictional texts as gaps, unsaidness, ambiguity, contradictions, violations o f some norms (Долинин, 1983). Implicit meanings are revealed in the text due to the non-linear relations o f language units. Implicitness can be presented by multiple linguistic phenomena, but the most conspicuous o f them are different expressive means and stylistic devices, and that can be accounted for by their ability to give rise to various associative links and connotative meanings.
Implicitness on the textual level has its own units —implicates regarded as a twofold structural and semantic units o f the implicit layer (Молчанова, 2007). This term was suggested by I.V. Arnold who defined it as “an additional meaningful figurative sense inferred from the correlation o f textual units” (Арнольд, 1974). The implicates (verbal signals o f implicitness) help the reader understand the hidden between lines information, the subtext, ‘4he second plan o f the work”. Among the most wide-spread types of implicates are 1) an implicit title; 2) implicit poetic details; 3) implicit stylistic devices: irony, metaphor, antonomasia, simile, etc.

Any literary text is characterized by some degree o f implicitness. To illustrate this assumption, the story by O ’Henry “The Last L eaf’ can be taken as an example.
The factual information o f the story is rather simple. Two young girls. Sue and Johnsy, artists by profession shared a room in a little district o f New York. Johnsy got seriously ill with pneu­ monia. She lost all hopes for recovery, and lying in bed, drearily counted the falling leaves o f the vine tree outside the window. She was sure that she would die as soon as the last leaf had fallen. When the turn o f the last leaf came, old Behrman, their neighbour, on a stonny night painted the leaf on the wall in front o f the window so that the girl could believe that the ivy leaf still stayed there. The next day the sick girl seeing the leaf, was amazed by its strength and was very much ashamed o f her own weakness. She decided to resist her disease and soon recovered, but old Behrman caught pneumonia that night and died in the hospital.
There are many implicit details used in the text to characterize the personages, their life conditions and their psychological state. The story begins with a detailed description o f the place the girls lived in: