Why is a crossword puzzle a text?

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the textual-grammatic description of the crossword as a type of text. The arguments are given in favour of the interpretation of the crossword as a type of text on the basis that it possesses all integral textual features. The main of these features are the following: the crossword puzzle, like any text, is the result of the communicative activity of members of a particular culture, a way of capturing the result which is conventionally accepted in a specific language and culture and conventionally formed in this environment. A crossword puzzle, being a text, demonstrates functional, meaningful, structural and intentional integrity. A crossword puzzle, like every text, is a way for people as speakers of language and members of culture to solve a certain communicative and cognitive problem within certain communicative settings using heterogeneous linguistic means. Using the procedures of macrostructural, primarily textual semantic and textual syntactic analysis, the authors describe the features of the manifestation of the main inherent textual properties of the crossword as a phenomenon in various linguistic and cultural spheres. The article also describes the specifics of the implementation of integral text features in crosswords as the ludic type of text. The means and methods of expressing textual categories in texts of the analyzed type are described. The methods of activating information in a crossword puzzle are carefully studied, since the mental action is a text-forming basis, significant for the organization of the text both from the structural and from the semantic and functional points of view. The essence of the crossword as a specific type of text is defined through its properties as a semiotically complicated, i.e., multimodal text in which creolization is accomplished. By comparing the ways of functional, semantic and syntactic organization of texts of this type in two languages and cultures – German and Russian – the thematic spheres activated in the crossword are determined, which allows the authors to evaluate the degree of significance of knowledge shared by all native speakers of the language and members of the culture and to gain access to the hierarchy of connections between various mental structures in the worldview of the corresponding collective subject as a representative of culture.