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Vostrikova O.V., Zyukova Ju.A. [Authorial specificity in the titles of A. Christie’s detective fiction] World of Science. Series: Sociology, Philology, Cultural Studies, 2022, Vol. 13, No. 2. Available at: https://sfk-mn.ru/PDF/27SCSK222.pdf (in Russian).

Authorial specificity in the titles of A. Christie’s detective fiction

Vostrikova Olga Vladimirovna
Pushkin State Russian Language Institute, Moscow, Russia
E-mail: o.w.wolke@list.ru
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8542-8975
RSCI: https://elibrary.ru/author_profile.asp?id=291762

Zyukova Julia Andreevna
Pushkin State Russian Language Institute, Moscow, Russia
E-mail: olesyagrm@gmail.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2832-8863

Abstract. The subject matter of the paper is the form and semantics (poetics and hermeneutics) of the title to a piece of fiction as an authorial specificity. The scope of the research lies within the framework of idiostyle of authorial peritexts, the title being one of them. The target of the inquiry was to identify the typical syntactic formulas and lexical contents of the titles to pieces of fiction within the H. Poirot’s cycle by A. Christie, to detect their typical semantic and communicative patterns and informative potential. The paper may be methodologically interesting to a reader abroad as it is grounded on the Russian scholarly canonical tradition of title poetics and title-typologies elaborated by I.V. Arnold and A.V. Lamzina and I.V. Iskhakova’s follow-up, «daring to measure titles» pre-reading informative overtness. To parse the lexical and syntactic parameters, elements of TROPES V8.4 were used. The obtained results of the linguistic and literary analysis brought out the typical syntactic and semantic configurations like in Dead Man’s Folly, The ABC Murders, Evil under the Sun, The Capture of Cerebus. The methodology and results may be applied for further case studies of other authors and other authorial peritexts as aspects of individual style. The implementation of the whole approach might also be of interest to continuation novel writers and for author’s attribution studies. We conclude that titles can be considered as peritext elements reflecting the author’s idiostyle, since one can statistically state the structural, lexical, semantic and communicative preferences in types of titles and relationships between them.

Keywords: title; idiostyle; literary text; peritext; structural, semantic and communicative title patterns; direct semantics; complicated semantics; degree of informativeness

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