SYNTAX AS AN OBJECT OF PARODY

Abstract

In the mind of the native speaker, there is an idea of the syntactic “optimum”, which allows them to use linguistic units most effectively to achieve a desired communicative effect. It contains a set of pieces of intuitive (“naïve”) knowledge about the parameters of the sentence, the organization of its structure, the rules of correspondence of lexical and grammatical meanings, etc. Deviations from this optimum can become independent objects of not only scholarly research, but also parody in a literary text. The article analyzes the problem lying on the borderline between linguistics, literary criticism and psychology: What syntactic features of the original text are enhanced or hyperbolized in parody? Analysis of numerous examples from Russian fiction allows the author to make a conclusion about the metalinguistic significance of certain features of the structure of the text. Collections of literary parodies (by A. Arkhangelsky, A. Ivanov, etc.) were subject to a special (continuous) analysis. The following syntactic phenomena were identified as the object and reason for their reflection in the parodies: a) excessive length of the sentence; b) artificial complication of its structure, specifically by means of chains of consecutive subordination, homogeneous members, abundance of epithets, etc.; c) absolutization of elements of oral, official and other speech styles, including the “telegraph style”; d) violation of the isosemy rule; e) non-realization of obligatory syntactic valency (unmotivated ellipsis); f) separation from the sentence of its part (parcellation), etc. These phenomena, used systematically, obtain a linguo-psychological characterization of salience (identifiability against the general background). As a result of the study, the author made up a list of syntactic facts that acquire the role of secondary signs in a work of fiction, along with other stylistic categories. Such a list, on the one hand, is intended to serve the convergence of scholarly (“academic”) and mass (“secondary school”) grammar, and, on the other hand, is of interest to experimental psychology, which studies the problems of perception and comprehension of the text.