Modality

Lecture 4. Informativity

Informativity is textual discoursive category, that reflects the interaction of informational spaces of all modules of discourse and that provides the informational balance of addresser and addressee interaction on the basis of the text (O.Selivanova).

Author’s semantic space vs Reader’s Space.

Olga Vorobjova correlates the semantic space of discourse with informativity and states the direct dependence of informativity on the constituents of communicative situation.

O.Selivanova suggests 6 subcategories of the TDC of informativity: Conceptuality, Factuality, Implication, Modality, Emotivity, Axiology.

Conceptuality – Kuharenko states that the category of conceptuality is not homogeneous. The category is directed at the disclosing the concept of the novel: expressing the main idea of the text or expressing the author’s understanding of the events s/he is writing about.

Concept of the text is a formulated idea of the text. The concept is formed gradually in the literary text, that is explained by devision of the information flow into several layers. I. Halperin defines 2 layers of information:

1. Contextual–factual information (змістовно-фактуальна) – What is going on?

2. Contextual–conceptual information – Why this is going on?

The peculiarities of the subcategory are:

– global character of the concept based on comprehending text as a whole and each constituent part in isolation.

– irregular character of the concept. Conceptually important information is distributed unevenly in the linear succession of the text.

– explicit/ implicit character of the concept is drawn from the informational spaces of discourse.

Often the concept of the text is correlated with the hypothesis which is confirmed of broken (the latter expresses the frustrated expectations).

Factuality – is a subcategory of informativity as a verbalized message about the events, processes, facts in the textual world, which is generated in the author’s mind and interpreted in the reader’s mind.

Implication – is the information represented implicitly (between the lines) and based on certain stylistic devises and lexical phenomena.

According to I.Halperin there are 2 types of I. in the literary text:

1. Situational implication based on the events in the text.

2. Associative implication based on our natural capacity to connect things and to use our background knowledge.

1. author’s evaluation of the utterance from the point of view of reality and irreality.

2. evaluation of the situation from the point of view of necessity and possibility.

3. evaluation of the level of the truthfulness of the utterance.

4. emotive and qualitative evaluation of the content of the utterance.

Classification of modality: objective (deals with reality) and subjective (expressed by modal verbs, structure of the sentence, composition of the text, it includes the semantic of the possibility, necessity, negation, emotional conformation).

Emotivity – is the emotional disposition of the author to have a certain emotional impact on the reader and emotional readiness of the reader to be effected. Cf empathy.

Axiology – is preconditioned by the character of described events or protagonists.

1. on the absolute scale: good –neutral –bad.

2. on the relative scale: better – even – worth.

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