Summary
Ashot S. Abrahamyan
Key words – Text, variant, interpretation, space, author, reader, abridgment, addition, sequence, set.
Alongside with a multitude of merely semantic interpretations, the text’s space characteristics – volume and sequence of the read text parts, act as important factors favoring the emergence of alternative versions of the text. Abridgement and addition are the two main text volume changes. Replacement is not an elementary procedure; it is a local combination of abridgement and addition. Additions can be classified by a number of criteria: by their author, level of their closeness to the original text and by their content correlation with it. The author’s text bears the opportunity of creating an infinite number of reader variants. Hence, it can be characterized as a macrotext, on the basis of which individual manifestations – reader microtexts can be formed. The text appears as a variety of diverse texts, and thus can be called polytext. There arises a situation like the one in Russell’s paradox. However, if the logical and mathematical solutions to Russell’s paradox lead to its elimination, the theory of text can take a different approach, recognizing the text’s paradoxicality as one of its characteristic features.