PERCEPTION AND INTERPERCEPTION THE CULTURE TEXTS BY THE CONTEMPORERY YOUTH

The paper looks at the perception patterns of cultural texts with a particular focus on their perception by young people. The research methods employed include comparative analysis of the authors’ intentions and the recipients’ interpretations as well as linguistic experiment. The empirical analysis focuses on the texts by prominent authors and journalists and their interpretation by students, high schoolers’ creative writing works to analyze cultural texts and experimental texts featuring gaps. The findings of the analysis into the perception of cultural texts by young people suggest that their perception is impaired as youngsters are unable to comprehend the nation’s history and culture-related semiotic elements. In case of a literary text they need to know the signaling features of a certain historic period or be familiar with the literary text itself. When dealing with an experimental mediatext the students were challenged with an abstract narrative lacking in images or featuring images which are used figuratively. Mass communication urges authors to address urgent and topical social issues, which suggest an emotional delivery featuring an idiosyncratic mix of bookish (archaic or dialectic) and colloquial (obsolete) lexemes. Recipients of these texts come from different social backgrounds and are less sensitive to the emotional charge of the text focusing merely on the text’s content. While attempting to comprehend the author’s message, they often fail to grasp the author’s intention and appear to be less emotional. The analysis of the most common flaws and failures in high schoolers’ essays revealed misused speech patterns and grammar- and style-related mistakes. This shows that they are lacking experience in drafting opinion essays. Another problem relates to their limited literary baggage as they are unfamiliar with classical texts and have no experience of analytical reading. Students’ texts often feature clichéd pseudo-scientific and formal stereotypical collocations which they see as markers of sophisticated style. Syntax-wise they tend to use sequences of words in similar syntactic functions, which, regardless of the author’s intention, make a vivid stylistic tool of gradation and therefore is always emotionally charged. Overall creative essays drafted by students are excessively pathetic. On top of it, youngsters appear to have no sense of style. More than that, they often turn out to be insufficiently literate, which adds to the problem. The research findings showed an unwelcome trend: lacking in experience of using culture-based words, they turn to jargonisms and obscene words to fill in these semantic lacunae.