Author’s name:
Valeriia E. Shtyrova – Samara National Research University, Samara, Russia
Abstract:
The dynamics of contemporary German literature, shaped by the book market, media advertising, literary agency practices, and inter-publisher competition, impose specific norms and principles governing the naming of literary works. This necessitates examining titles not only within the traditional framework of artistic discourse but also through the lens of interfering naming discourse. As the primary identifier of a literary text, the title plays a pivotal role in attracting readership. Novel titles are prominently featured on book presentation posters, author event advertisements, digital platforms, and book fair promotions, underscoring their marketing significance. This article examines modern German-language novel titles structured as sentences of varying types, analyzed from a linguistic-pragmatic perspective. The research material comprises 258 titles of German-language novels published in Germany between 1989 and 2022, encompassing both premium (literary-awarded) and mass-market fiction. The most frequent sentence-type title is the one-part nominal sentence, confirming the primacy of the nominative function in titling. The next trend identified is related to the desire of authors and editors to achieve commercial success with readers in the book market. It is for this purpose that motivational, interrogative and imperative sentences are used as titles. These syntactic types of sentences perform not only the emotive function of the title, but also realize the advertising potential of the novel name. Complete declarative sentences fulfill an informative role, offering readers explicit details about a novel’s plot or chronotope. Subordinate clauses of complex sentences in titles serve to intrigue readers, with the full novel text effectively acting as the “main clause” to the title’s syntactic fragment. In terms of research prospects, future work will systematize the typology of sentence-based titles, further exploring their autosemantic and synsemantic functions in shaping literary reception.
| Section | LANGUAGE AND CULTURE |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2025-70-2-46-59 |
| Downloads | 12 |
| Key words | sentence; modern German-language novel; title functions; naming; syntactic structures |