Grafisko zīmju funkcijas mūsdienu latviešu lugās
The Functions of Graphical Signs in Contemporary Latvian Plays

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the structure of the text. The empirical basis of the study consists of approximately 600 broader syntactic construction units excerpted from contemporary plays by various Latvian authors. The aim of this article is to analyze the use of graphical signs – punctuation marks and emoticons – in emotive, intonative, text-formation, referential, and phatic functions in contemporary (since 2000) Latvian play texts. Graphical signs are used in emotive function to express the feelings and attitude of the author of the text, in intonative function to represent the prosody and pauses of the spoken text, in text-formation function to create a unified text in concordance with the communicative purpose of the author as well as the requirements of the functional style and speech genre, in the referential function to convey messages and information to the recipient, and in phatic function to express the sender’s attitude and maintain a good relationship with the receiver. The article analyzes the use ellipsis, dashes, single quotation marks, exclamation marks, question marks, colons, full stops, their combinations, and emoticons. The descriptive method is used in the study when examining and analysing units extracted from drama texts, the quantitative method when determining the frequency of graphical signs in the text with the Microsoft Office Excel program.

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