Scholarly record

CHRONOTOPE IN ENGLISH, ARMENIAN AND RUSSIAN FOLK FAIRY TALES: LINGUO-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES

A. Minasyan, A. Kozis, E. Golubovskaya, T. Baranovskaya

Abstract

Fairy tales have their roots in archaic society and archaic thought, thus immediately succeeding myths. Myths have close connection to their bearers and folktales are ‘displaced’ in time and space. The timelessness of the tale and lack of geographic specificity endow it with utopian connotations. The spatiotemporal indefiniteness, or such a definiteness, which is not characteristic to reality is the most essential feature of the tale genre. The particular construction of fictional space and time, the chronotope, is genre-specific; each genre has its own unique chronotope. With this structural approach, fairy tales differ in their organization of time and space. Fairy tales take place in one magical world, detached from our own both in space and in time, the reader or listener of a fairy tale is detached from its space and time. In traditional fairy tales, which take place in a detached time and place, readers are not supposed to believe in the story. The addressee of a fairy tale is situated outside the text; the communication is based on a fictional contract between the sender and the addressee. The toponyms used in fairy tales can be both factual and imaginary. The chronotope of tales is distinctly reflected on the level of its poetics. In fairy tales the chronotope habitually finds its expression right at the beginning of the text – in the initial formulas. Other main structural units of tales are final formulas, which bring readers back to earth, to reality, and ease the transition to normal conversation. The final formulas make listener think over the secret message hidden in the tale.

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