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AN ANALYSIS OF TITLE FUNCTIONS (ON THE MATERIAL OF DARYA DONTSOVA’S IRONIC DETECTIVE NOVELS) // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2021. Issue 1 (27). P. 157-179

The aim of the article is to examine the semiotic nature of the titles of detective novels by Darya Dontsova based on the three dimensions of semiosis: semantics, syntactics and pragmat-ics. Semiotic analysis serves as the main research method. Contextual interpretation, structural, stylistic and pragmatic analysis, metaphorical modeling and genre questionnaire are auxiliary methods. The research hypothesis lies in a supposition that the basic function of the title of a lit-erary text, unlike that of a mass media, scientific, etc. text, is to label, index a text as an integral sign. An informative function of the title can be realized after understanding the whole text, de-termining its genre, and taking into consideration the overall dialogism of the text with the au-thor’s oeuvre and with the intertext of the literary process. For advertising purposes, some titles are not intended to predict the sense of subsequent texts. The features of Dontsova’s titles are paradoxicality (elements of titles are semantically incompatible), abundance of precedent signs, intertextuality, intersemioticity, carnivalization, language game, parody, persuasion, and sug-gestiveness. The semantic parameter of title semiosis presupposes clarifying the content-related link of the titles not only with subsequent texts but also with the reader’s intertextual and in-tersemiotic knowledge. The semantics of the titles of Dontsova’s ironic detective novels is corre-lated with the frequently secondary structural components of this genre and is characterized by the metaphorical borrowing of lexemes from different source domains. The syntactics of the ti-tles is realized through relations with different components of the texts, with megatext and in-tertext, with nonverbal cultural semiospheres, including precedent phenomena. The pragmatics of the titles is to spark interest, curiosity, desire to resolve the paradoxes of the title by reading and understanding the content of the book. Paradoxicality, inherent to titles of ironic detective novels, serves as a powerful means of suggestiveness, affecting both readers’ consciousness and the unconscious resources of the psyche. The prospects of this research are to focus on the stra-tegic programs of the communicative influence of titles of popular literature, to conduct experi-mental studies on the index of the title informing properties and on the title predictive value for subsequent texts.

Keywords: title, index, semantics, syntactics, pragmatics, intertext, language game, parody, persuasiveness, suggestiveness, paradox, carnivalizition, precedent phenomenon