Subject analysis of narrative literary texts: searching a dialogue between the conceptions of aboutness/meaning and thematic/figurative processes

Abstract

The identification of concepts can be considered one of the most complex stages of subject analysis, either for involving subjective aspects of the analyst, either because the Information Science literature is more traditionally concerned on the study of subject representation, with emphasis in the indexation languages. In such a context, the studies related to aboutness have received a special attention, although they attempt to the nuclear and intrinsic theme of the document. However, the scientific studies on aboutness are mainly centered on the scientific text (ISO norms on subject analysis for indexing purposes are a good example of that), without approaching documents of another nature as it happens to literary texts. In this way, the aim of this paper is to analyze the perspectives of identification of aboutness in literary texts —and more specifically the narrative ones— by means of a comparison between the literature on knowledge organization and representation (KOR) and structural semantics. For this, it starts with a theoretical rescue of conceptions of aboutness as a support to the subject analysis in scientific documents as well as some experiences on its application to technical documents. After that, the narrative text is characterized in its structure of content (specially the thematic and figurative processes). On the basis of such elements, a comparative analysis is carried out between aboutness/meanning structure foreseen by Beghtol and thematic/figurative processes approach by Greimas and Fiorin, in order to reach their distinctive traces. Beghtol’s concepts of aboutness/meaning reflect in some measure the conceptions of extensional/intensional aboutness (Faithorne), topicality/ informativeness (Boyce) and normal relevance assignment/differential relevance assignment (Van Dijk), and leads to the idea that the same document can have different meanings for the same reader in different times, but, by itself, it possess a basic and invariant aboutness. In the narrative text, themes and figures can be considered two levels of meaning, since the thematic level can be observed in all text long but it is not necessarily able to be transformed into figures. So, the opposition between theme and figure leads to the opposition between abstract and concrete, not a polar one, but as a continuum, considering it goes, in a gradual way, from the most abstract to the most concrete. The figures are chained ones with the others, by using concrete references from the natural world and the themes are shown in more abstract meanings, with terms that organize these figures. By comparing these approaches, a group of distinctive traces is shaped and applied to a corpus of narrative literary texts. The results of the research disclose the dialogue —and the complementarity— between both approaches (aboutness theory and thematic and figurative processes) while tools for the identification of concepts in subject analysis, by considering that the recognition of figurative and thematic processes, as inherent elements to the structure of the text, supplies a starting point to the identification of concepts in aboutness/meaning analysis. In this way, it can be concluded that the adoption of such procedure is efficient for subject analysis of narrative texts in the sense that it contemplates either the meaning structure of the document and the context of use of the information (user and institution), as the foreseen Albrechtsen’s approaches on document reading