PROBLEMS OF TYPOLOGY OF TITLES: A GENERAL OVERVIEW

The article deals with the phenomenon of titles of works of art, literature and cinema and their functional and typological features. It is clarified that the title has a dual nature, since it is correlated with a part of the text and is perceived as a form of existence of extra-textual reality. It’s substantiated that a title may be absent in a literary or artistic work; instead, numerical designations or the first lines of a poetic work may be used (such titles are defined by J. Levinson as "empty"). At the same time, the absence of titles is uncharacteristic of works in the field of cinematography, since all audiovisual works presented in the catalog of the Ukrainian State Film Agency contain a title, which serves as the film's heading. The article outlines the approaches of scholars to the differentiation of types of titles. In particular, G. Genette considers the title as a paratextual unit that functions as part of peritext and epitext, and also distinguishes its denotative, thematic, rematic and connotative functions. J. Levinson distinguishes three groups of headings based on the referential, interpretive and additive functions. The researcher H. Levin introduces the term ‘titology’ to study the titles of works; in his opinion, the title should be considered a literary genre, since without the presence of the main text it is meaningless. Having analysed the approaches to the definition of a title, a title can be defined as a nominative unit, but it is not identical to the term ‘title of a work’, since, in addition to the nominative function, a title performs a number of other functions (for example, informative, expressive, vocative, emotive, etc.), depending on the approach of scholars to their differentiation.