Intertextual Fragments as a Barrier on the Way to the Interpretation of the Text Meaning

Abstract

The problem of understanding and interpreting the meaning of the text appears to be the central one in text studies. The study of text meaning based on the principle of dialogical nature of human thinking enables us to presume, that the process of textformation and text interpretation results in the dialogue of two minds, two conceptual systems, that of the writer and that of the potential reader. The success of this dialogue, i.e. the understanding of the text by the reader, to whom the author’s mind appeals in the process of dialogue, largely depends on the amount of the so called shared knowledge, contained in the conceptual systems of the author and the reader. One of the main features of modern texts is the extreme variety and complexity of meaning presentation. Very often meaning is not presented explicitly or expressed with the help of unconventional means and its explication calls for a considerable talent of interpretation, an inferential effort and as well as a wide thesaurus of thereader. As the article shows, one of such barriers on the way to understanding is the meaning coding with the help of allusion to another, so called precedent text. The characteristic feature of modern texts is the high degree of their intertextual density. Such intertextual fragments very often carry out the most important meanings, and the lack of knowledge of precedent texts or the failure in their interpretation results in the failure to understand the dominаnt meaning of the text. As the result of the study the author concludes that an adequate interpretation of the text with intertextualelements is conditioned by the following factors: 1) the level of the reader’s intertextual competence; 2) the presence in his/her cognitive base of a richintertextual thesaurus; 3) the ability to correctly use the data of the intertextual thesaurus in the process of verbalizing the results of his / her reflection over the text meaning.