The Narrative Text as an Act of Communication

Abstract

OLLOWING THE DISCOVERY of a parallelism between certain cultural phenomena and the act of communication in natural language, one of the most important tasks in contemporary semiotic analysis has become the construction, on the basis of this parallelism, of a typological model. The fruitfulness of such an approach has already been demonstrated.' The present essay examines in this light the narrative literary text, i.e., a verbal text which functions as a secondary modeling system in relation to the natural language in which it is written.2 This status of the literary text determines the similarity and the difference between such a text and an act of practical [bytovaya] communication, and it is precisely the system of similarities and differences on which is founded the model here presented. We shall first examine those basic parameters which in theory characterize any act of communication. Since the appearance of the famous Ogden-Richards triangle3 and the functional triad of C. S. Peirce4 and Charles Morris,5 the notion of connotation (pragmatics) as an inseparable and constitutive part of semiosis has become firmly established in contemporary linguistics and semiotics. By connotation is understood information about the participants in the communicative act over and beyond denotation, i.e., information about the object of communication itself. For Biihler, connotation was further analyzed into the expressive and the appellative functions in accordance with the bilateral nature of the communicative act.6 A further distinc-