From Text to Polycode Text: Semiotic Changes in Text Production

Abstract

The article is devoted to the investigation of the linguistic notions of “text” and “polycode text”. The notion of a text has recently undergone a lot of changes in its interpretation. Nowadays, while defining of texts it has been offered to take into account different approaches to their study including not only grammatical, cognitive-semantic, communicative-pragmatic, but also semiotic and semiotic-cultural. The development of IT, the globalization, and changes in the ways of coding of information have increased the role of the semiotic approach in the interpretation of texts. Within the semiotic approach, today’s text is regarded as a set of monocode or polycode communicative resources which correlate with each other, form a complex integrative meaning and are addressed to recipients with a certain pragmatic purpose. It has been proposed to distinguish between monocode and polycode texts and to use the term “polycode” to accentuate the coexistence of two or more codes in one text space. A polycode text is regarded in the article as a coherent unit consisting of several semiotic codes: verbal, non-verbal (photographs, pictures, pictograms, ideograms, smiles, cartoons, tables), paraverbal (color, font, punctuation, layout, diacritical marks). Changes in the encoding of the information in texts and the emergence of new communicative resources have led to the necessity of the reviewing of text’s textuality. Polycoding and multimodality have been regarded in the research as standarts of textuality as well as cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality and intertextuality.