The Principle of ‘Comic-Effect Provocation’ in Children’s Fiction

The article deals with fiction texts intended for children that are based on the principle of ‘comic-effect provocation’. This principle creates the effect of disappointed expectation due to the paradoxical development of the plot relative to a given presupposition. Comic-effect provocation is widely used in works of modern children's writers, which dictates the need to analyze the specific features of such play-based texts from the point of view of their formal and semantic organization. Encouraging the reader to decode the constructed plot ‘trap’, such texts, as a rule, have the property of double addressing, which correlates with the problem of the reception and interpretation of such texts when perceived by children and by adults. The study aims to analyze the plot-forming strategies used in modern children's fiction that exploit the principle of ‘comic-effect provocation’ as a phenomenon of the culture of laughter. Research methods: descriptive-structural and descriptive-functional analysis aimed at the identification of semantic fragments that consistently implement a provocative plot-forming strategy in conjunction with text markers of ‘switching meaning’. The paper presents a typology of plot-forming strategies that create the effect of ‘deceived expectations’ in the works of modern children's writers: false identification of the character; strategy of discrediting the role mask; strategy of role ‘boomerang’; strategy of creating a fantasy reality. The identified strategies were considered in relation to the techniques of language play involved in the plot. The material for the study included poems of Mikhail Yasnov, stories by Artur Givargizov and Stanislav Vostokov all taken from a family reading almanac.