Metalinguistic Reflection in the Autobiographical Story by V. P. Krapivin “Slavka from Herzen Street”

The relevance of the study is related to the increased attention in modern linguistics to issues reflecting the metalinguistic reflection of the speaking person, and is due to the active use of metalinguistic comments in the text of V. P. Krapivin’s autobiographical work “Slavka from Herzen Street”, their important role as a means of expressing the author’s intention and establishing contact with the reader. The purpose of the article is to consider the objects of metalinguistic reflection, the types of metalinguistic comments in the named work, to identify and characterize meta-operators. During the work, the following methods were used: contextual analysis, descriptive method, classification method. It is noted that in an autobiographical work, reflexives are contained mainly in the speech of the author-narrator and include his comments about language and speech not only from the position of an adult, but also from the position of a child through the prism of an “adult” perception of objective reality. Most often, concrete and proper nouns become the object of metalinguistic reflection in the work under consideration. The work identifies and analyzes the following types of metalinguistic comments reflecting metalinguistic reflection: 1) ideas about language, linguistic units and the relationships between them, based both on scientific knowledge and objective facts, and on the speaker’s naive understanding of linguistic phenomena; 2) a characteristic of a linguistic unit and a linguistic fact, based on their perception by the individual and containing an assessment from the point of view of compliance with the so-called reality, the speaker’s value and emotional attitude to it; 3) features of actualization and use of a language unit in a specific speech situation. It is concluded that the inclusion of metalinguistic comments in the text is one of the features of V. P. Krapivin’s idiostyle; the multi-aspect characteristics of linguistic units, facts of language and speech, the use of verbal and graphic meta-operators indicate the author's desire to make the text as understandable as possible for the reader, to establish a virtual dialogue with him, and also shows the writer's caring attitude to the word and to the Russian language in general.