Religiously Marked Allusions as Knowledge Structures Activators

Abstract

The article aims to delineate religiously marked allusions and their twofold interdependent properties in the literary text: religiously marked allusions as the carriers of religious information and activators of religious knowledge structures in the literary text. Religiously marked allusion constitutes a direct or indirect referent to the precedent religious text, and hence embodies a large scale encyclopedic, specifically, religious and culture specific information in its semantic construct. The adequate interpretation of religiously marked allusions presuppose the existence of corresponding religious knowledge structures in the reader's mind. To reveal specific features of religiously marked allusions as knowledge structure activators in the literary text, the method of conceptual analysis was applied. The method of conceptual analysis is targeted at revealing conceptual significance of religiously marked allusions, and explicating the author's individual world picture and conceptual information implicitly presented by him/her in the literary text. To achieve the research aim first factual, subtextual, conceptual information of the linguistic material was exposed. The results of the analysis show that in addition to religious knowledge structures, religiously marked allusions activate old and new, collective and individual, objective and subjective knowledge structures too. In addition, being highly influenced by the author's individual conceptual world picture and modality, religiously marked allusions can be reinterpreted and obtain additional or totally new conceptual senses in the literary text. Consequently, specific types of knowledge structures externalized by religiously marked allusions often showcase contradictions between old and new, collective and individual, objective and subjective knowledge structures.