Polytextuality as a basic characteristic of popular science text

Tang Zhen

The purpose of this article is to identify the features of the composition and verbal design of popular science text in the media. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the study of the structural-semantic organization and stylistic features of a popular science text in the media is carried out on the basis of the concept of such a compositional unit as a subtext, highlighted by the author in relation to the spheres of human activity, the forms of social consciousness associated with them and fixed communicative practice in relation to them with style groupings of speech genres and the linguistic means that form them. The results obtained showed that the polytextuality and polystyle character of the presentation are constitutive features of a popular science text, since it is the integrality of subtexts that ensures the effectiveness of impact on different types of consciousness of addressees; in accordance with the task of broadcasting scientific information to non-specialists, the basic unit of a scientific subject - a scientific concept - is subjected to multiple recoding; in an ordinary subtext - into a “naive” (everyday) concept; in the artistic subtext - in the artistic image; in the publicistic subtext - into a socially evaluative semantic unity.

Keywords:text; popular science text; polytextuality; subtext; functional styles of speech.