Full text release has been delayed at the author’s request until August 24, 2013.

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures, 2008.

Abstract

The interdisciplinary effervescence of the 1960’s-1970’s resulted in the adoption of terms like “information,” “entropy” and “code” into linguistic and literary analysis; one of the schools that contributed to this tendency was the Soviet semiotics school, represented by scholars like Iurii Lotman, Boris Uspenskii, Viacheslav Vs. Ivanov. This dissertation offers a critical examination of the controversial aspects of the interdisciplinary connection between information theory and semiotics, concentrating on Iurii Lotman’s works on the theory of the text. In order to address the question of the applicability and relevance of information-theoretic principles to text analysis, this dissertation proposes (a) to offer an understanding of how “structure” in the linguistic sense can be related to the concepts of information theory; (b) to evaluate Lotman’s use of information-theoretic terminology against the scientific “standard”; (c) to develop an understanding of what, in information theory, could be relevant to the analysis of texts. The central claims that emerge from my theoretical investigation are (a) that the formalism of information theory is not compatible with Iurii Lotman’s theory of the text and that the attached terminology has been used in ways unrelated to the assumptions and results of information theory; (b) that the formalism of information theory does provide the basic elements for an approach to structure in the most general sense and that these elements can be made relevant to both linguistic description and text analysis; (c) that it is possible to formulate a coherent approach to the text as an informational object by taking into account the distributional properties of the variables that can be defined in the text at various structural levels; (d) that it is possible to use these properties to characterize the specifics of the language of a text and its relationships to other texts, and therefore to guide, and add coherence to, the application of traditional approaches to the text. The second part of my dissertation is dedicated to applying the theoretical considerations to the analysis of texts from 20-th century Russian literature, including G. Ivanov’s Raspad Atoma, M. Bulgakov’s Master i Margarita, I. Bunin’s Grammatika liubvi.

Subject Headings

Language; Linguistics; Literature; Slavic literature

Keywords

information theory; theory of the text; semiotics; information; entropy; code; Lotman; Bulgakov; The Master and Margarita; Georgii Ivanov; Valerii Briusov; Ivan Bunin

Committee / Advisors

Dr. Irene Masing-Delic (Advisor)
Dr. Charles Gribble (Committee Member)
Dr. Daniel Collins (Committee Member)

Pages

162p.

Document number: osu1218122289
Permalink: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1218122289