Context as an activator of connotations (on the material of Kurt Pinthus’ anthology “The Twilight of Humanity”)

Abstract

The goal of this research consists in determination of the types of contexts in the lyric poetry of German expressionism that contribute to the emergence of connotations in the semantics of a word. The subject of this article is the extralinguistic and linguistic contexts. The work employs the methods of contextual, component and interpretative analysis. In chronological sequence, the article describes various theories of contextual analysis and summarizes their main provisions. The author differentiates two types of context in a literary work: extralinguistic and linguistic; the latter is divided into micro- and macro-contexts. The poems of anthology of expressionist lyrics of Kurt Pinthus “The Twilight of Humanity” served as the material for this research. The scientific novelty consists in determination of the five types of linguistic micro-context, as well as analysis of the results of their interaction with semantically implemented word based on the material of the lyric poetry of German expressionism. In the course of study, it was established that extralinguistic context includes the artistic worldview of German literary expressionism as a whole, and artistic concept of “vitalism” as one of its crucial structural elements in particular. A specific poem is a macro-context. The indicatory minimum for the semantically implemented work contains five mechanisms: grammar parallelism, subjective predicative relations, complement in the genitive case, complement in the accusative case with preposition, attributive. The emergence of connotations in the sense of semantically implemented work was viewed on the example of representatives of the artistic concept of “vitalism”, which in broadly understood as “activeness”. The acquired results can be used for comprising individual authorial glossaries, as well as handbooks on text stylistics and history of foreign literature.