Literary Text in the Paradigm of Modality: Authenticity of the Event

Abstract

The article investigates the problem of the authenticity of the event in a literary text in the framework of evaluation and modality, both the author’s and the characters’. The relevance of the study is determined by the anthropocentriс principles of modern linguistics, the study of “a human in language”, which, in turn, predetermines the need to clarify the linguistic parameters that can be applied to the text in the aspect of identifying the degree of authenticity of a possible world as such. The purpose of the article is to find out and describe the modality markers that make it feasible to represent the events of a literary text as reliable and perceived by the reader as the only possible truth. Research methods, among which the preference was given to the methods of observation and comparison, the method of philological interpretation, pragmatic and semantic analysis of microcontexts, were applied to the object of study in a complex manner, which resulted in pinpointing and describing the differences in the representation of the authenticity of an event in the author’s and characters’ zones of modality. The reader’s perception of the events of a literary text as authentic is modeled by the author by means of multi-level means of modality, the content plan of which, moreover, is complicated by the introduction of a subject of narration into the text that is different from the author (narrator) himself. In the zone of characters’ modality, only lexical and grammatical means are used, while the author’s modality is characterized by the additional use of syntactic structures targeted at the creation of authenticity, the appeal to biblical motifs and images, as well as direct addressing to the reader. The background knowledge of the reader, O’Henry appeals to in his Christmas novella, allows to carry out the synthesis of multi-level means of evaluation and modality, which takes the events of a literary text beyond the limits of authenticity.