A character as a communicant : interdisciplinary application of the linguistic term

Abstract

The article presents synthesis of the literary and linguistic terms on the background of philosophical, psychological and historical approaches with the purpose to obtain a more precise instrument for analyzing dialogues in drama and epic works. Communicative Linguistics, its models, principles and techniques appear to be the closest to the needs of Literary Studies where it concerns a deeper analysis of the plot and its representatives. The general understanding of communication is based upon a new concept of the contemporary American philosopher J. D. Peters. It is based on the plurality of meanings, which acquires special importance in interpersonal communication. Therefore, acceptance and tolerance to the foreign meaning as a result of a communicative act is being introduced into the structure of a literary character. A purely literary definition of a character is limited by such elements as temperament, disposition and outlook. The author proves the necessity to consider one more element, which is the character’s communicative capacity. The interactive model of communication has been selected as the most acceptable one for the synthetic understanding of a character-communicant (M. Bakhtin, R. Bart). A scientific discussion is being conducted with F. Batsevych regarding several issues. The first one is his classical philosophical communication paradigm of ‘development of common meanings’ as the goal of the communicative act. The second issue is F. Batsevych’s specific analysis of the extract from the comedy Martyn Borulia by a Ukrainian playwright I. Karpenko-Kary. The author is concerned that the linguist declares interdisciplinary connections with multiple Arts and Humanities, except for Literary Studies. The author proves it necessary that the complex approach in the Communicative Linguistics is adopted if communicative linguists analyze a work of literature as well a necessity to take into consideration the historical and cultural context of the work, a complex author’s play with his/her character, artistic subtext, character’s subconscious (i.e. not declared,
and therefore undetected as linguistic objects) intentions. The analysis of the communicative situation conducted by F. Batsevych obviously lacks the aforementioned elements. Instead, the literary analysis by virtue of Communicative Linguistics is enriched with the characters’ communicative reactions, upon which special importance is placed during drama studies.