Genre forms in the children’s magazine “Tram”

The article is included in the range of works devoted to the study of genre characteristics of texts and genre forms. The relevance of the study is determined by the specific nature of speech genres and their variability. The purpose of the work is to research the magazine “Tram” as a speech genre and its genre forms. The material for the study was the journal issues published between 1990 and 1995. The article tries to consider the relationship between the concepts of “genre” and “genre form”. The authors adhere to the point of view that a “genre form” is a genre that is part of the structure of another, more complex genre. One of the genre characteristics of the magazine “Tram” and its constituent genre forms is creolization/polycode, a combination of verbal and paraverbal components. On the one hand, the interaction of these elements turns out to be a feature of all magazines for children and teenagers. On the other hand, drawings, sometimes their predominance over the verbal text, their location on the page, color, variety of fonts distinguish the analyzed magazine from others. The magazine “Tram” distinguishes genre forms, which are divided into two groups – traditional and new ones. The analysis shows that traditional genre forms are stories, comics, riddles, fairy tales (folk, author’s, fantasy ones), works of young readers, instructions; new genre forms include a conversation with the reader, the genre of limericks, words-epigraphs, fairy tales, messages about Orthodox holidays, cooking recipes (“gastronomic pages”). The authors of the article considers “traditionality” to be conditional, because while maintaining the genre form, the content of the texts presented in the magazine differs from the texts of the same genre forms from other children’s magazines: the basis of the riddle is not comparison or metaphor and epithet, but irony; the stories are constructed as a dialogue that continues from issue to issue, or they are preceded by comments from the compilers regarding the author or the content of the work; there appear intertextual tales, in the creation of which readers take part.

magazine, children’s magazine, genre characteristics, genre form, text, creolized text, traditional genre forms, new genre forms