Abstrakt: | The contemporary language reality is considered very dynamic. This dynamics
is clear in the time, spatial and functional perspective. It is impossible to
claim these multi-aspect changes will not influence the ways of communication.
Many things were written about the changes in culture and language. Not
much attention was paid to the contemporary written variety. Meanwhile, the
observation of the contemporary written texts, an observation in relation to - as
it may seem - fixed values, including the value of writing, induces to consider
the written aspect of contemporary communication. It is not a study of the graphemics
or graphic linguistics field. Remaining in the field of considerations of
Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, I wish to discuss the problem of literacy as
the way of thinking, ordering the reality and try to show the tendencies that may
endanger the permanence of the literate way of thinking.
The observation of technological changes in communications leads to a conclusion
that a renewed approach of the written variety to oral variety takes place.
Constant and intensive ‘exposition to technology’ places a word - the culture of
communication in general, including a written word — in a new situation, and the
texts of contemporary written Polish language already reflect this interaction.
The degree of literacy of Poles is one of the most often called and discussed
phenomena of the dynamically changing contemporary culture. The reading of the
description of sociological researches into the competence of Polish youth in the
field of comprehension of texts induced me to take my own research from the
sociolinguistic and pragmatic view. The degree of comprehension of texts is a testimony
of the level of interiorizing the rules of literate thinking, the lack of such
absorption, to be more specific. In the field of research into functional illiteracy,
I place not only the diagnoses of the reasons of non-comprehension of texts, but
also the reasons of the inability of creation of contemporary written texts. The
observation of the transformations within the written variety of a language leads
to a conclusion concerning the direction of these transformations, which head
towards a renewed relation with the oral variety in new entanglements on one
hand, and the domination of image over communication (iconosphere versus logosphere)
on the other, i.e. the iconization of a language. I call this phenomenon
‘a new literacy’. The concept of synesthesia plays a constitutive part in the identification of
this phenomenon and the indication of its features. I present it as an important
sense-creative and text-creative factor of the contemporary written utterances.
Synesthesia is not only a result of stylistic procedures, but also a feature of perceiving
and conceptualization of reality. Synesthesia present in written texts is
a product of two culturally strongest impulses: the dominating orality and expansive
visuality of culture.
A thesis saying that there are many contemporarily created written texts
(non-artistic, non-mimetic, and non-stylized) whose structures reveal the presence
of synesthesia, because it is related to the activation of a situational memory
of a sender, and whose comprehension, i.e. their pragmatic sense, is related to
a synesthetic reception. The transparency, i.e. the transparency of a key word, is
sometimes ‘suspended’ in these texts. The sense of a text is not exhausted in
logical objects on the principle of presupposition or connotation, the situation
needs to be recreated by the receiver. It is only a tendency that is noticeable, not
a feature of all or the most of contemporarily created texts. This tendency may
become fixed however, if one should consider the growing influence of communication
with the use of the Network, where the violation of the transparency of
a sign and its completion with synesthetic impulses is quite obvious. |