Text categories the notion of text categories and their classification

The category of intertextuality

In discussing the problem of text categories it should be noted that many categories have got a complete account in the works by I.R. Galperin and Z.Y. Turaeva. In our manual we shall turn to the categories which have escaped much attention. In this respect the phenomenon of intertextuality is of great importance. Intertextuality is defined as a peculiar quality of certain texts to correlate with other texts. Intertextual correlation can be manifested at different levels: thematic, semantic, structural. Some scholars consider intertextuality a text category (Чернявская, 2009:185). We adhere to this viewpoint, and suppose that intertextuality is one of important, though optional, text categories.

There are two approaches to the problem of intertextuality: from the position of theory of literature and that of linguistics. In literature intertextuality is understood in a broad sense, and any text is regarded as an intertext. It is accounted for by the fact that all texts are related to our knowledge of the world, reflect people’s cultural and historical experience, and therefore any text contains elements of other texts in a more or less recognizable form. This conception found strong support among Russian and foreign scholars (Ю.М. Лотман, И.П. Смирнов, Б.М. Гаспаров, R. Barth, M. Riffatere).
From the linguistic perspective, intertextuality is limited to those texts, which have explicit reference to other texts. In such cases, the author deliberately conceptualizes the relationships between two texts with the help of special formal means (Арнольд, 2002; Чернявская, 2009; Пьеге-Гро, 2008). In other words, there must be special intertextual signals, indicators and markers in the text. The special literature on this subject marks various kinds of intertextual relationships: title, epigraph, “sounding names”, antonomasia, parody, repetition of text forms (structure, rhythm), lexical units, allusions and etc. Intertextuality is regarded as a cognitive process of interaction of two texts: the precedent and the recipient text. The precedent text is the source referred to in the process of intertextual correlation.The precedent text is a well-known text of axiological significance relevant both to the world and national cultures. The sources of precedent texts are mostly: myths, legends, religious text, fiction, phraseological units, aphorisms, the titles of famous books, films, quotations, etc. The recipient text is the text containing intertextual inclusions or signals of intertextuality, presenting the intertext itself. Intertext in its turn is expressed by epigraphs, citations, allusions, reminiscence, quotations, periphrasis, etc. The most frequent intertextual inclusion is allusion. The mechanism of intertextuality is presented in diagram 7.

Our observations have shown that one of the most frequent intertextual inclusions is allusion. Allusion in the fictional text accomplishes the function of an “intertext”, decoding of which requires establishing actual connections with the original text. It is achieved by comparing and contrasting two texts and revealing their similar features. In this regard an allusive title is of most interest because, conceptualizing the whole text, it promotes a net of associations and intertextual connections with other texts. The title of the story by O’Henry