Culture specific words as cohesive markers of a literary communicative text (in the fantasy novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling)

Abstract

The paper deals with text linguistics and focuses on the leading approaches (structural-grammatical, semantic, socio-communicative (pragmatic), synergistic) to text study as a whole, its levels, units, and categories. It is proposed to interpret text as a horizontally and vertically level content-functional whole that integrates segmented text units – supraphrasal unities, which formal, semantic and communicative structure is provided by linguistic means of the category of coherence representation (in its correlation with the categories of continuum, integrity and discreetness), determined by an author’s intention that is encoded in text. Simultaneously with the research of text structural-semantic content that is formalized by linguistic tools of the category of coherence realization within the boundaries of a supraphrasal unity (a set of the latter), an attempt has been made to identify a literary text as a cultural sign system that reflects mentality, cultural values, origins, social reality, experience, images, sounds, objects and practices of its author. A literary text is considered as a cultural discourse with its own concepts, signs and codes covert by an author in a literary text, which meanings are extracted by a reader in interaction with text in the process of its interpretation. The purpose of the analysis is to trace cultural realities and their role in the grammatical coherence and communicative organization of a literary text discourse. The material of the study is the structure of the fantasy novel “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” by J. Rowling, which is full of terms of the British background culture. Therefore, it seems possible to investigate cultural realities in the structure and content of a literary work, to qualify cultural markers as functional, informative and communicative units of a coherent literary whole, to identify cultural terms as prominent cohesive markers of a literary textual discourse.