Realization of the category of informativeness in ultra-short English stories

Abstract

This article describes the peculiarities of the actualization of the category of informativeness in a relatively new genre of online literature – short short / ultra-short English stories. An ultra-short story (microstory) is a text with a limited number of words (from 6 to 1000 words). A micronarrative has a unique feature of hiding or implying a larger story. In other words, most of the information in the ultra-short story is conveyed implicitly. The reader himself has to decode what was not said, to restore the hidden, implicit meaning (subtext). To create a subtext, authors of microprose use different linguistic and stylistic means. The article deals with the use of such means as metaphor, metonymy, allusion, pun, periphrasis, euphemism, abbreviations, aposiopesis, ellipsis, idiomatic expressions, proverbs and sayings, connotative meanings of words etc. Decoding of the nonverbalized content in an ultra-short story often requires a certain amount of time, intellectual effort, specific knowledge, intense mental work of the reader.