The strategy of understanding signs of superstition in television discourse

Abstract

   The article studies the television series “The Blind”, “A Hex” and “The Fortune Teller”, “The Witch Doctor”, “Weegee” and “The Elder”, in which the identification of the semantic content is carried out through superstition signs. The use of signs, rituals, rites, etc., actively functioning in the discourse of television series, makes it necessary to highlight the strategies and signs that the viewers identify in order to correlate their own picture of the world with an illusory, fictional representation of the world, and believe in it. The primary role in this process is played by signs that summarize and explain what is happening on the TV screen.

   The main purpose of the work is to describe the functions of superstitions, based on the lexico-semantic field “family”: prognostic, prohibitive and regulatory.

   It is established that the relationships between family members are determined by their knowledge of the signs, prescribing a certain domestic behavior, based on a system of prohibitions and permissions. In this regard, television series are considered to be a non-verbal text, including implicit symbols and signs that need to be deciphered with the help of a translator of ancient knowledge, whose role is performed by various elders, witches, clair-voyants, etc. The analysis of a large corpus of new superstitions allows us to state that different age groups of viewers display an increasing interest in the existence of a parallel world that controls all their actions, and even their lives, as evidenced by the increasing number of such TV series.