Ethnocultural German text «Kalendergeschichte»: prototypical features of the composition and plot organization of the text structure

Linguists of the 21^st century are actively engaged in the typology of texts. Text types that are insufficiently studied from a linguistic point of view are of special interest to them. These text types include «calendar stories» developed from a «calendar» as a mass media in the ethnic culture of Germany. Entertaining historical and satirical stories of a sentential nature went beyond the calendar at the beginning of the 19^th century and formed an independent literary genre «calendar story» (ger. «Kalendergeschichte»). In order to identify the prototypical features of the compositional and structural organization of this text type, the author analyzes the calendar stories of the collection «Treasure house of the Rhenish friend of the house» («Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes») of J.P. Hebel. As a result of cross-cutting analysis it was determined that the «calendar story» as a special type of ethnocultural German text has the main features of the compositional-speech form «narration», its conciseness. This allows us to refer the text type under study to literary narrative, small epic genres, which are characterized with a single story line and a clear structural and compositional organization of the text as a whole. In the composition and plot construction of the calendar stories three «strong positions» of the text were highlighted – a title, a beginning and an ending. Information about a main activity of a main character, nature of an event and place of its action has been recognized as dominating in the titles of the «stories from the calendar». The main types of compositional and semantic design of initial positions of the text include: an exposition, an author's remark and a plot. In relation to the ending of the calendar stories, the author identifies three types of final positions of the text: a pointe, a denouement after a pointe, and a moralizing author's remark, which can be a final act of the calendar story, general advice for practical application, and a lengthy discussion on a moral topic.