A Semiotic Framework for Projecting Comparability Issues of English and Ukrainian Christmas Carols

A Semiotic Framework for Projecting Comparability Issues of English and Ukrainian Christmas Carols 

Key words: Christmas carol, sign, dimensions of semiosis, comparison, English/Ukrainian

Semiotics, being a field with immense variety in it, its conceptual apparatus may be well used by contrastivists, though the conceptual systems of various branches and approaches within the framework of contemporary semiotics differ considerably. Even if, since the 1970s, semiotics as a discipline has noticeably extended its limits, its potentially general models and conceptual system(s) are still being formed (Kull, Velmezova 2014, p.531). In this paper, semiotics is defined as the study of semiosis, i.e. processes in which something functions as a sign (Peirce 1998, p.411). The present work's ambition is to suggest a semiosis-based approach to the contrastive analysis of Ukrainian and English Christmas carols that represent extraordinarily multifaceted objects of contrastive studies.

The list of tasks includes the following: 1) to outline a theoretical framework for the study of Christmas carols, exploring the potential of Peirce’s and Morris’s ideas on semiosis and to substantiate three approaches to the analysis based on the dimensions of semiosis (Fig.1);

2) to identify genre features of Christmas carols and to substantiate their attribution to ritual singing discourse; 3) to study dimensions of semiosis from the standpoint of their potential for the comparative research of carols with special attention to: a) the nature of code units; b) the relation of code units and external objects and c) of code units and internal objects (Andreichuk 2020); 4) to describe divergent and convergent features of English and Ukrainian carols applying the developed semiosis-oriented technique.

Initially, the author enters a dispute with Morris (Morris, 1938) and suggests singling out the code, informational, and cultural dimensions of semiosis. Further discussion concentrates on the comparative analysis of English and Ukrainian carols applying these dimensions and a three-fold account is provided: 1) how carols are encoded, that is, made ready for transmission and interpretation through the representation of a series of conventional means that are characteristic of the genre (poetic and musical coding); 2) how English and Ukrainian carols are differently classified considering the informational dimension with special attention to unique eulogistic and mythological Ukrainian carols; 3) how carols integrate in national cultures. Attention is drawn to the multitextuality of some Ukrainian carols brought to life by their nation-shaping function.

The arguments are substantiated by references to The Oxford Book of Carols of 1928 (Dearmer et al., 1928) and the latest Benjamin Bloomfield’s collection of 2024 (Bloomfield, Benjamin, 2024). The Ukrainian carols were selected from Hnatiuk’s collection of 1914 (Hnatiuk 2019) and the 21st-century collections (Christmas Songbook, 2023).