Dzyubenko A.I. Linguistic Pragmatics of Literary Fiction: Unreal Modality in V.V. Orlov’s Novel “The Pharmacist”

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2025.5.4

Anna I. Dzyubenko

Candidate of Sciences (Philology), Associate Professor, Department of Intercultural Communication and Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3228-4277

Abstract. The article considers the role of textual unreal modality in the formation and functioning of literary fiction. It identifies and describes the means of textual unreal modality, which has extensive linguistic and pragmatic potential. Analysis of the research material made it possible to establish that literary fiction arises on the "border" of literary "reality," which in V. Orlov's novel "The Pharmacist" reminds the reader of the objective reality at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s and of fiction that does not contradict this literary "reality." The functioning of the textual unreal modality in the novel is determined by the communicative and pragmatic characteristics of the subject of the story – the narrator, who plays the role of a mediator between the literary world and the reader. In the novel the subject of the story can also become an unreliable narrator and an omniscient author, which allows us to consider literary "reality" as a multi-level model, in which it is the narrator who grants fantastic features to such "reality." Literary fiction is formed through multi-level means of textual unreal modality: pronouns marking the subject of speech, introductory words, parceling, irony, gradation, metaphorization. The narrator transmits the event through his own perception of it, distorting it not only chronologically but also in terms of participation/non-participation of specific characters in events. All types of textual modality in the literary text point to characteristics of unreality.

Key words: literary text, literary fiction, unreal modality, author's intentionality, narrator, literary "reality", addressee, linguistic pragmatics.

Citation. Dzyubenko A.I. Linguistic Pragmatics of Literary Fiction: Unreal Modality in V.V. Orlov's Novel "The Pharmacist". Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Seriya 2. Yazykoznanie [Science Journal of Volgograd State University. Linguistics], 2025, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 51-61. (in Russian). DOI: https:// doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2025.5.4

Attachments:

4_Dzyubenko.pdf URL: https://l.jvolsu.com/index.php/en/component/attachments/download/3178

3 Downloads