Temporal structure of the German horoscope text

In the modern dynamically developing world, of the three time planes - present, past and future - the future becomes especially significant for a person. In this regard, there is a growing interest to horoscopes as prognostic texts, which allow a person to “look into the future”. In recent decades, a number of works have appeared that are devoted to horoscope text research. At the same time, many aspects of this text type are still little studied or not studied at all, the temporal structure of the horoscope text being an example. Since the plane of the future, characterized by anthropocentrism and a well traceable pragmatic component of the meaning, is central to the horoscope, the temporal characteristic is relevant both for creation and perception of this text type. The authors study the temporal structure of the horoscope, presented in a form of a net. Along with the plane of the future (prospection), the planes of the present (introspection) and the past (retrospection) also play their roles in the horoscope structure. In this connection, the temporal net of the horoscope includes a rather impressive repertoire of linguistic means. In this paper, these means are presented as a system based on the field model. The core and the circumnuclear zone of the field are formed by verb forms with future semantics. The periphery of the field is represented by verb forms, creating the introspective and retrospective planes of the horoscope. The study is based on the analysis of horoscope texts from 48 issues of journals, published in Germany - Gala, Brigitte, Bravo, Popcorn, Astrowoche and Astroblick - in 2013-2017. The authors use the following methods for their research: descriptive method, comparative method, continuous sampling method, method of quantitative-qualitative analysis and method of contextual analysis. The authors come to the conclusion that the use of linguistic means with temporal semantics in horoscopes depends on such factors as the type of a horoscope, the target group of readers, the date of publication of journals and the forecast period. In terms of correlation between the forecast period and the date of publication, all horoscopes can be divided into two groups: group A, horoscopes printed a few days before the forecast period, and group B, horoscopes printed on the date coinciding with the beginning of the forecast period. The composition of linguistic means with temporal semantics and their frequency vary in the two groups.

Keywords

Authors

References