VERBAL REPRESENTATIONS OF BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE (ON THE MATERIAL OF ENGLISH PRESS)

Abstract

It is considered that background knowledge the same as any other kind of knowledge is a cognitive notion in the first place. Thus, it can be inferred that we are to distinguish between background knowledge itself and particular ways of its realization. There is a very wide range of terms which are closely connected with the use of term “background knowledge” (presupposition, implicit meaning, subtext, vertical context, connotation, etc.) The most important and justified out of these seems to be the opposition of background knowledge and frames, because frame is also a unit of knowledge. Background knowledge is an inalienable part of human mind and is retained in human memory; it is not included into frames because of its uniqueness, singleness, specificity of its objects; background knowledge of two people can be mutual in case when mutuality is not perceived as similarity; they have different depth, which is conditioned by a person’s culture; creating texts authors verbalize in them fragments of their background knowledge and sometimes focus on the “addressee factor”, and in some cases neglect them; verbal representations of background knowledge have allusive nature and appear to be carriers of either pragmatic information (if we refer to the object of knowledge), or stylistic (if we refer to the text or texts lying behind the object of knowledge), or these two types of information are mixed; while activating fragments of his background knowledge in the text in a language form, the author can create implicit innertext connections with the help of these verbal references, and when the text is of fictional character, he can also construct (consciously or subconsciously) a vertical context.