Creolization as a genre-forming feature of the texts of natural written speech (a case study of a girl’s album genre)

Abstract

The paper aims at studying the external (technical) aspect of natural written speech text as a characteristic contributing to the materialization of the text as a sign and, at the same time, to its genre identification. The analysis of a girl’s diary genre reveals the heuristic possibilities of creolization as a genre-relevant property of the formal organization of the text, with its texture synthesized by various semiotic systems. Given the relationship between the graphematic means and the codes of other semiotic systems, two types of texts are identified. These are (1) partially creolized texts with autosemantic relations between the verbal and visual components based on the autonomy of structural elements of the text and (2) completely creolized texts with synsemantic relations between the graphematic means and the elements of other semiotic systems. The functions of a girl’s diary as a creolized text are determined: presentational function, contributing to the author’s self-expression; axiological function, aimed at representing the value dominants of a teenage girl; and gaming, determined by the phatic and dialogical components of the text. The combinations of elements of various semiotic systems contributing to the creation of substantial metagraphemics of the text are investigated. Graphematic means are seen to synthesize with various elements of supragraphemics, making it possible to transform the text contents (variation of font, intensity of graphemes); topographemics, associated with the planar variation of the text (paper constructions that change the spatial design of the text); and chromographemics, associated with the color design of the text.