of the socio-historical experience acquired in the process of cognition of the objective
reality [40]. Association in the text is the result of the established by the
addresser associative relations (both background and text), which are laid down in the
semantic contents of the text units. These relations determine the nomination of the
fragment of extralinguistic reality that is associatively (by adjacency or similarity) is
connected with the fact that appears in the value of the units.
Associative relations, fixing the received knowledge (not just knowledge of the
objectively existing inter-relations of the objects of extralinguistic reality, but also the
knowledge gained as a result of the establishment of the dynamic temporal relations),
are involved in both in the emergence, and in the functioning of a verbal sign [39].
Mandatory value also provides the mandatory associations that surround the word
in the consciousness of native speaker. The association defines the ability to use words
in the text, as well as provide its understanding correlating it with other text units and
system of languages [41].
Thus, for example, in a fragment from the novel by Maugham “The Moon and
Sixpence” we selected the converged author`s digression that is combined with the text
of the story using the associative cohesion:
I asked myself whether was not in his soul some deep rooted instinct of creation,
which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a
cancer may grow in the living issues, till at last it took possession of his whole being
and forced him irresistibly to action. The cuckoo lays its eggs in the strange bird's nest,
and when the young one is hatched it shoulders its foster – brothers out and breaks at
last the nest that has sheltered it [18].
With this author`s digression the author using clear to all image of a mother
cuckoo and cuckoo-child, explains to the addressee, how the instinct of creativity in
the main character Strickland destroyed his family and life principles. When the hero
faces a choice between art and family, he chooses art. Both the retrospection and the
appraisal modality here are obvious. Retrospection is manifested in the fact that the
reader for a proper understanding of the information displayed in author`s digression,
he should know the previous information. Thus, here a relation of an associative plan
emerges.
The analyzed texts of the author`s digression illustrate the specificity of
functioning of the associative index in the text, which is that while it is decoding in the
mind of the reader; a certain amount of information is updated, which is then “narrowed
down” with a context. The availability of the associative indices in the text makes the
process of decoding of the last as a discrete, which provides appealing the background
knowledge of the reader. The understanding of the semantic content stored in the
associative indicator (background or text) is based on an appropriate system of
knowledge that is stored in the memory of the reader.
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