COGNITION, SEMIOSIS, COMMUNICATION: THE SUBJECTS OF CONTEMPLATION IN THE RECENT 25 YEARS

Abstract

The article contains review of academic publications by I.Kolegaeva, which came out in 1991–2016 and which deal with the issue of communicative linguistics, cognitive linguistics and semiotics. The mainstream research split into several branches. Among them is the study of communicative structure of a text, which varies in different functional styles and genres. The earliest publications put forward the idea of a megatext: a unity of the main text (namely: a story, an article, a novel, an essay etc.) and a number of supporting texts (namely: a preface, commentaries, an annotation, a resume, bibliography and the like). Each of the latter performs specific function aiming at improving the result of communication. Another branch of the investigation suggests the idea of cultural paradigm of a belles-lettres text. The point is that a highly popular literary text inevitably undergoes the process of communicative transformations: there appear numerous translations, adaptations, comics, screen and stage versions, all of them declaring their identity with the initial text through identical title, plot and personage system. Taken together the initial text and its numerous transforms comprise a cultural paradigm of the text. The cultural space is filled not with texts as they are, but with such paradigms. Average users most frequently deal with the transforms rather than the initial texts. Still another branch of the performed research investigates the issue of semiosis as it is reflected in multimodal (polycode) messages. The study of world image formation gave impulse to discovering and describing the principle of onomasiological relevance which regulates cognitive activity of people and results in either naming some object or ignoring it thus leaving lacunas in the world image.