Yuri Sorokin: Text as a Self-Developing Entity

Sorokin’s ideas remain relevant in many areas of Psycholinguistics. The specificity of Sorokin’s concept of text understanding is determined by its deep connection with traditions of world Psychology and Linguistics on one hand, and attention to human activity’s specifics where a human being cannot be dissociated from being a part of culture and products of his/her activity (including speech activity), on the other hand. Examining the text as a self-developing entity, Sorokin considers “psychosemantic epistemology” to be the most effective methodology of a literary text’s analysis. It is based on the laws of perception and understanding of a text formulated by Nikolay A. Rubakin. Sorokin believes that a text is a form of substantiation of experience gained by a human being in all sorts of activities. Text as an aggregate of signs has potential content that is formed only in the course of the text’s interpretation. Sorokin studies a number of ethnopsycholinguistic issues, solutions to those issues enables inclusion of the following statements in the theoretical justification of understanding of a text: an individual as a representative of a certain ethnos appropriates ethnically specific ways and means of mastering the world and represents this experience in speech activity; the semiotic-behavioral side of the personality reveals its belonging to the culture of the ethnic group and is reflected in the structure and content of texts created by the individual; language units that possess cultural and symbolic meaning serve as markers of ethnicity. Sorokin considers it necessary to create special “non-analytical” methods of text analysis that would be adequate to its properties as a self-organizing system. First of all, it is the search for tools for measuring subjective assessments that reflect “axiological formats” of understanding or non-understanding of a text (e.g., method of semantic integral).