The language of resistance of the Theatre of the coryphaei (based on posters as a type of advertising text)

Abstract

Background. The theatre of luminaries led by Mark Kropyvnytskyi embodies cultural resistance during the time of tsarist prohibitions, when the public use of the Ukrainian language became an act of national identification. The activities of the Coryphaei filled the repertoire gap, ensuring the longevity of their works on professional and amateur stages from the 1880s to the present day. Not only the content of the productions, but also the texts of their playbills testify to the national orientation of the Coryphaei Theatre.

Linguistic analysis of the posters of the Theatre of the Coryphaei as a type of advertising text reveals their structure: titles with the names of plays ('Martin Borulia', 'One Hundred Thousand'), lists of actors, date and place, supplemented by imperative calls that activate pragmatic potential. These texts combine a nominative function (informing) with an appellative one (persuasion), using lexical means of influence - epithets, hyperbole and rhythmic punctuation to emotionally engage the audience.

Methods. Linguistic, linguistic-pragmatic, structural-semantic, linguistic- stylistic, linguistic-statistical, and corpus methods of analysis were used.

Results. The analysis revealed that the posters for Ivan Karpenko-Karyi's plays evolved from verbal resistance to Russification (bilingualism in 1901's 'The Landlord') to visual-metaphorical nationalism (banknote/embroidered shirt in 2008-2017's 'One Hundred Thousand'), implementing the models of J. Riffaterre (Riffaterre, 1971) (attraction-conviction) and AIDA (Hogan, 2007; Maxwell, 2008) through a triple dominant: reference (80 %), appeal (imperatives ~20 %), expression (epithets ~15 %). Dialectisms (>30 %), allusions ('Ukrainian-style swindle') activate the decolonisation frame according to Lakoff (1980), hybridity according to Selivanova (2008) enhances rhythmic persuasion, and, according to N. Fairclough's three-level model (Fairclough, 1992), (censorship^-resistance^-reception of the UNR), transforming ephemeral announcements into artefacts of national discourse.

Conclusions. An analysis of Ivan Karpenko-Karyi's play posters as a type of advertising text shows their evolution from a verbal-hierarchical structure with a bilingual topos (1901 'The Landlord') to a visual-metaphorical dominant (2008­2017 'One Hundred Thousand'), reflecting the transformation of national discourse from resistance to Russification to postcolonial identity.

The discourse analysis and characterisation from the perspective of pragmatics according to R. Riffaterre have made it possible to demonstrate the poster as a multimodal artefact of cultural resistance, ensuring the continued reception of the classics in contemporary theatres.