ИСТИНА

Electronic literature signifies a new form of textuality which supposes the including of different semiotic components. Analyzing the electronic literary text specifics, we describe the way that information is represented in the electronic environment as well as the nature of its transfer and the recipient’s sensory channels. Despite the fact that these factors have extralinguistic nature, they influence significantly the electronic literary text semantics and structure. The multimodal nature of electronic literary discourse bridges physical and digital worlds and supposes the integration of different semiotic components. It strongly affects the structure and semantics of literature tropes, metaphors, the cognitive components of which are represented by different sign systems. To clarify the mechanism of sense formation of multimodal metaphors we will rely on the ideas which have already become classics of metaphor theory. First, it is the difference between two notions, "concept" and "perception", which is explained by J. Deleuze. According to the researcher the combination of two "percepts" (i.e. visually perceived images) will create the effect of not just a general idea of any phenomenon or event, but a certain "concept" [Deleuze]. At the level of the perceptual field of metaphor, the main source of new meanings is the author's associations which are determined by his or her level of education, communication skills and style of thinking. The author carries out a number of operations to work with images, the most important of which is "recognition" or the identification of the object selected from a variety of similar objects, and its "replacement" on a similar object. In this case, the unfamiliar or ‘alien’ object is described through the known and classified according to set parameters. Such a result is achieved since in the metaphor there is an implicit opposition of the ordinary vision of the world corresponding to the classifying (taxonomic) predicates, revealing the individual essence of the object. The metaphor rejects the belonging of the object to the class in which it actually belongs and asserts its inclusion in the category to which it cannot be attributed on a rational basis. This coordinate system is in line with the ideas of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, describing the interaction of two knowledge structures ─ the cognitive structure of "source" and the cognitive structure of "purposes" [Lakoff, Johnson p. 392]. Metaphorization is based on this interaction. The division into "source" and "target" shows the direction of metaphorical transfer. The source area ─ this is more specific knowledge obtained by a person in the process of direct experience of interaction with reality. The target area is less clear, less specific, less definite knowledge. Metaphor is the result of a systematic projection of a conceptual structure of the source area on the structure of the target area. The same conceptual source area can accommodate different types of events and scenes associated with that particular type of experience. This dual structure is easily extrapolated to multimodal discourse. Thus Charles Forceville understands monomodal metaphors as “metaphors whose target and source are exclusively or pre-dominantly rendered in one mode”, while multimodal metaphors are “metaphors whose target and source are each represented exclusively or predominantly in different modes”, where mode is understood as “a sign system interpretable in terms of a specific perception process, which can be linked to the five senses: visual; sonic; olfactory; gustatory and tactile” [Forceville, 2006, p. 383- 384]. Multimodal metaphors, according to Charles Forceville, can be divided into several subtypes such as the contextual, hybrid, simile, verbo-pictorial and integrated metaphors [Forceville, 2006]. Even though this subdivision was made on the basis of multimodal discourse research involving only two components: static pictures and language (except integrated metaphors). These subtypes can be extrapolated to the electronic multimodal discourse which possesses much more opportunities to represent different semiotic signs via various modes. Multimodal representation of electronic literature supposes that the same mode can represent different codes. For instance, the audio mode under this description lumps together spoken language, music, and non-verbal sounds while the visual mode unites written language, graphics and animated objects on the screen. As a result, a multimodal electronic literary text supposes the representation of its elements (explained by the same code or different ones) via different modes while a monomodal work uses just one mode to represent single-code or polycode elements.