THE ROLE OF ALLUSION AS AN ELEMENT OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE DETECTIVE DISCOURSE (ON THE BASE OF THE STORY “THE GENUINE TABARD” BY E. C. BENTLEY)

Abstract

Тhe given article focuses on the research of the intertextual elements in the detective discourse. Being a “dialogue” of two texts, intertextuality represents a two-dimensional structure, divided into material and thematical. The given types of intertextuality are expressed in borrowings of the elements of plane of expression (a word or its variant) and of plane of content (plots, motifs, topics, images) respectively. In the research we address to the study of the thematic intertextuality in order to determine a biblical plot, which is in the basis of the detective story. To achieve the task we analyze the allusion, which, being an indicator of material intertextuality, represents a hidden type of borrowing elements with the help of which the recipient recognizes the pre-text. The study focuses on identifying Biblical allusions as Biblical text is the most used pre-text in the European culture. Containing references to the Holy Scriptures, the detective discourse itself suggests a connection with the Christian values. As the source we took the story by E. C. Bentley «The Genuine Tabard». The analysis of the story is based on the algorithm, consisting of four steps: identifi cation of the biblical plot; the comparison of the characters’ main features; determining linguistic means, which confi rm the connection with the source text; defi ning the unattributed allusions. Identifi ed allusions are of diff erent types of implicitness: easily decoded ones, expressed with the help of biblical phraseological units, and the ones which are diffi cult to decode (unattributed), manifested in the change in part of speech, synonymous constructions and words, semantic correlation and syntactical structure of sentences, the decoding of which implies the possession of a specifi c cultural background knowledge. During the analysis of the text, we distinguished two types of the allisions, the ones which transform the plot, and the ones, which allow to decode the biblical plot in the given discourse.