The Application Of Fractal Theory to The Study Of English Discourse Organisation
Svetlana S. Zajchenko · The European Proceedings of Social & Behavioural Sciences · 2018
Fractal theory is a key part of not only synergetics – it has successfully integrated into a number of humanitarian sciences including linguistic studies. The concept of fractal was first introduced by the mathematician Felix Hausdorff, but the term we use today was coined by Benoit B. Mandelbrot, another outstanding mathematician and polymath. In the following article, the notion of fractal set is specified to the study of open systems which, unlike abstract mathematical structures, are continuously changing and developing under the influence of internal and external fluctuations. The article presents a brief review of how fractal theory has been successfully applied to analyse various kinds of discourse: literary postmodernist, fairy-tale, poetic, pedagogical and filmic, all of which are analysed with the help of a new, semiotic-synergetic approach. The latter relies on the achievements of philosophy, semiotics, synergetics and linguistics and aims at a more thorough research of semantic and structural peculiarities of discourse organisation.