WHAT IS NOT IN THE TEXT: TOWARDS THE PROBLEM OF IMPLICITNESS IN DRAMA

Abstract

This article examines implicitness, its realization and decoding by lexical-semantic means in fiction. The authors substantiate their claim that implicitness is an inherent language feature co-existing with explicitness. Establishing the perspective of a linguist-literary scholar, the authors provide a multi-level meaning presentation from literal to figurative and symbolic, based on discourse analysis. It is shown that much of the meaning can be concealed in the text and extend the limits of the latter. The analysis reveals that implicitness develops by lexical-semantic and lexical-syntactic means, through a diverse array of generative and interpretative devices.