On the ratio of folded and expanded propositions in the texts of german-language soccer fan banners

This article examines folded and expanded propositions in the German-language texts of football fans’ banners, which they use during the matches of the first and second Bundesliga. The relevance of this study is determined by the fact that football is the most popular sport among fans all over the world and therefore their discourse requires separate consideration. The scientific novelty of the study is that in the German-language texts of football fans’ banners, folded and expanded propositions are being studied for the first time. The purpose of this work is to examine the ratio between folded and expanded propositions in banner texts and to identify the pragmatic intention of using a particular structure. Banner texts were selected as the research material, in which folded and expanded propositions were revealed. The classification of statements posted on the banners of German football fans is based on the ratio of folded and expanded propositions. The order of consideration involves analyzing banner texts containing an expanded proposition in the first part and a folded one in the second, and then options are proposed in which the folded proposition precedes the expanded one. The research used general scientific methods of cognition (analysis, synthesis, generalization, comparison). The study revealed that when a folded proposition is positioned at the beginning of the syntactic structure, the context and theme of the utterance are revealed even with the compression use of linguistic means. The expanded proposition in the second part of the syntactic structure complements the theme foregrounded at the beginning of the text. By the position of expanded proposition, at the beginning of the syntactic structure, for the most part, a description of the situation or the addressee is given, a specific topic is introduced, but the context of the situation is not always or not fully revealed. Folded proposition makes up for the omission of an expanded proposition, reveals its theme, can complement it, allows to understand what the purpose of the whole maxim is, while the form makes it concise and expressive.