From memory to oblivion: Linguistic markers of a dreamlike narrative on Russianlanguage forums

The article proposes a linguistic model of a dream narrative as a propositional network and a practical marking scheme aimed at identifying and systematically describing the opposition “I remember – I don’t remember” in online discourse. The relevance of the study is determined by the rapid growth of specialized Internet platforms for sharing dream experiences: In the context of collective interpretation, individual dreams cease to be private experiences and are transformed into socially significant texts, which raises the task of developing methods for analyzing the cognitive-pragmatic mechanisms of memory and oblivion in these narratives. The aim of the work is to develop and test a model of a propositional network for describing dream narratives and to propose a working marking procedure that allows the poles of “memory/oblivion” to be reproducibly recorded in a corpus of forum texts. The following tasks are solved within the framework of our goal: 1) to form and describe a corpus of forum dream narratives; 2) to identify and annotate propositional units and their corresponding frames, in particular “memory” and “oblivion”; 3) to analyze the semantic-pragmatic functions of the opposition “I remember – I don’t remember” as a selective, epistemic, and communicative mechanism; 4) to develop recommendations for the marking and interpretation of dream texts for further use in linguistics, psychology, and cultural studies.

The novelty of the study is the integration of the propositional approach with frame semantics and research on computer-mediated communication as applied to dream discourse: first, an operational procedure is introduced for identifying propositional units and comparing them with the frames of “memory” and “oblivion”; second, the role of epistemic markers and temporal-spatial anchors in the reconstruction of semantic coherence is formalized; third, a practical text markup is proposed that is suitable for subsequent corpus processing and interdisciplinary use. Methodologically, the study is based on corpus and qualitative discursive analysis of authentic messages from Russian forums about dreams (including Tonkimir.ru, Somn.ru, etc.): The identification of propositional units, the categorization of frames, the identification of temporal and spatial markers, the fixation of epistemic and affective means, as well as the analysis of the authors’ pragmatic strategies (persuasion, invitation to interpretation, pragmatic fixation of authenticity).

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