NEWSPAPER TEXTS AS INTEGRITY: SUPERTEXT / HYPERTEXT / MACROTEXT

Abstract

The article studies the possibilities of terminological nomination of a set of newspaper articles published in a number of consecutive issues of the same newspaper. The articles cover a definite referential situation and form a big text. The textual formation under analysis is characterized both by narrative characteristics (depicted space, time and subjects) and by discourse characteristics (unity of the authors’ position, the readers’ expected reaction, relation to the referential situation which takes place around the main event or events). In this research we will study three possible variants of nominating the corpus of texts under analysis: supertext, hypertext and macrotext. Each of these terms has its own domain of use and a number of definite semantic features. Supertext is characterized by such parameters as invariance (there exists a text-invariant and each of the texts belonging to the set is considered to be its variant), atemporality (the temporal factor isn’t important), dominance of aesthetic function (opposed to the informative function). In its turn, hypertext is characterized by fragmentation (division into fragments, text-units) which provides cross-referencing, accessibility (hypertext can be entered from any fragment), active readership (the reader chooses the entrance point), communication “equality” between separate texts united by the same theme and constituting the big text. In accordance with the narrative and discourse features of the studied set of texts (connection between the narrative time and real time, the integrity based on the subject manifestation, plot development), we suggest using the term « macrotextе» to denote the set of newspaper articles under analysis.