Paralinguistic Tools in an Electronic Literary Text: Types, Structure, Semantic and Pragmatic Characteristics

Abstract

The rapidly growing trend of information visualization in the modern communication space determines the relevance of this research, which is based on the analysis of the electronic literary text non-verbal components and their visual and graphic design. The purpose of the article is to identify the main methods of verbal components of graphic selection in electronic literary texts and their functional analysis. The material is represented by electronic literary texts based on Adobe Flash and HTML. The main methods of the research are general scientific methods such as monitoring and description in conjunction with the method of comparative linguistic analysis. The types of graphic highlighting that are traditionally used in written/printed text are also reflected in electronic literary texts. They include: 1. Graphic text segmentation; 2. Kerning (increasing the interval between letters); 3. Line spacing; 4. Font variation (changes in font type and color); 5. Capitalization (using uppercase letters instead of lowercase); 6. Italics, underscores, optional quotation marks (and various combinations of these techniques); 7. Inclusion of other sign systems elements (Latin/ Cyrillic/ Runic letters, numbers, encoding elements and etc.). As a result, the author concludes that techniques for verbal components graphic selection in electronic literary texts have several areas of functional load. Paragraph-based tools intensify the implementation of emotional and symbolic functions associated with the impact on the emotional background of the electronic literary text perception and the expression of its concepts.

Key words: electronic literary text, paralinguistic tools, graphon, graphic segmentation, graphic and visual selection, font variation.

DOI 10.18522/1995-0640-2020-4-77-88