LINGUISTIC INDICATORS OF TEXT TYPES IN THE MEANING AND STRUCTURE OF THE DETECTIVE TEXT OF THE TWIST OF A KNIFE BY ANTHONY HOROWITZ

Abstract

The article presents an understanding of the means of systemic interaction and ways of actualising units of different levels that form the structure of a literary text created by a writer. The author’s position, or view, seeks to analyse the structure, form, and content of a literary work. The author’s thought emerges on the surface in all areas and types of presentation; however, it is presented in the most direct and frank form in the author’s discourse zone, representing (the external textual communicative model) and in the narrator’s discourse zone, representing (the internal textual communicative model). Their distribution, however, is uneven, as it depends significantly on text types (text types, modes or types of discourse, rhetorical modes – i.e., compositional and speech forms) in the East European terminological toolkit of the metalanguage of description – narration, description, and argumentation. It is these that serve as the object of consideration in the first article of the trilogy in the discursive-narratological dimension, taking into account semantic indicators in the structural organisation of the detective novel The Twist of a Knife (2017) by Anthony John Horowitz, an English prose writer and screenwriter, specialist in the genres of adventure, mysticism, thrillers, and horror. The subject of study is the role and frequency of linguistic markers of text types as components of content creation and structuring of the compositional and speech level of the macrostructure of the detective textual world. The article uses traditional names and nomenclature for text types, which are recognised by most European centres of text linguistics. The basis of text types, their internal logical content, is demonstrated by the established categories of time, space, and cause. The narrative creates the dynamics of the surrounding world. Description is a static state at a given moment. Argumentation in an obvious form outlines the subject’s ability to think abstractly, establish cause-and-effect relationships, moving away from the specific facts of artistic reality. Text types do not differ in nature and content of information: plot-dynamic (narrative), image-creating (description), general-theoretical, commentary (argumentation). One of the main features distinguishing a text type is its relationship to artistic time: narration shapes the course of plot time, description slows it down, and argumentation stops it. Narrative is recognised as a diachronic cross-section of reality, description as synchronous, and argumentation as a form not related to the objective course of plot time. The emergence of any text type in the detective story under study is marked by its linguistic design. This article examines changes in the lexical content and semantic structure of text types within the detective textual world.