PREFACE AS PARATEXT (BASED ON THE HERITAGE OF N. I. NOVIKOV)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the preface genre as a paratext. The author considers the “historical” media discourse (socio-political orientation) in order to identify discursive means. The analysis focuses on the prefaces to the publications of the Russian educator of the 18th century N.I. Novikov: to «Drevnyaya rossijskaya vifliotika», «Drevnyaya rossijskaya idrografiya», «Skifskaya istoriya». The urgency of the study is derived from the importance of research of the historical dynamics of the genre and stylistic structure of journalistic texts, since the historical retrospect demonstrates obvious changes in the genre field and genre canons, architectonics and composition, semantic structure and denotative dominants, and rhetorical and stylistic arrangement of such works. In order to identify different methods of exercising verbal manipulation of the reader, the author uses a combination of methods: traditional descriptive, semantico-stylistic, cognitive, and communicative-pragmatic analysis. The results of the work show that the author has explored the information potential of the authored and publisher’s preface as a paratext; has revealed the ways of speech realization of the content-factual and conceptual information; has determined the role of axiological means in the organization of these categories; has determined the content specificity of the preface among other forms of paratext; has analyzed the impact of the freedom of the content vector on the organization of the conceptosphere of the text; has described the ways of representation of events and the discursive organization of interaction between the creator of the text and the potential reader as the main speech tactics of differentiating between authored and publisher’s prefaces; has demonstrated that the tactic of creating the author’s image determines his position in the communicative triangle “author - reader - publisher”. The results of the work can be used for further studies of paratext within the framework of historical stylistics, political, cognitive and communicative linguistics.