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Abstract: The article deals with the specific features of the organization and the axiological constituent of language game fiction texts of modern children’s literature. Language game, being an obligatory component of the generation of such a text, performs a plot-forming function in it, “involving” the addressee (the child) into the creative process of deciphering the author’s intention. The practical research material comprises the short stories of the children’s writer K. Melikhan, whose individual style is distinguished by a pronounced game-based dominant, through which fantastic and real “plots” from the lives of modern schoolchildren, and in general the specificity of children’s mentality and worldview, are highlighted in a paradoxically humorous key. From this point of view, the study analyzes the genre forms of language game texts used by the writer, conveying the author’s idea and certain axiological attitudes in a non-standard key that is entertaining for the reader (and not only for a child). Axiological registers of language game in children’s fiction are interpreted in this study as certain authorial experiments related to the representation of the benchmarks of children’s linguistic consciousness in the axiological dimension. The study distinguishes such axiological registers in the short stories of Melikhan as: the precedent register of language game, using the stereotypical formulas of the fairy-tale canon, understood in a humorous and ironic key; useful (didactic) advice – in the genre of a joke (parable); the axiological register of discrediting game-based imitation (in the genre of portraying or describing the appearance of characters with the help of children’s speech jargon); the axiological register of language game, conveying the features of paradoxical children’s logic – including conscious manipulation of the word meaning. In general, the axiological vectors of language game in children’s literature are oriented towards the mental dominants of the linguistic consciousness of the child reader, which creates conditions for involving them in co-creation with the author, stimulating the deciphering of a deliberately modeled paradox that creates a humorous effect. At the same time, the language game fiction text of children’s literature is a text with a double addressee, which is due to the depth of derivability of game-based implications by a child and an adult. In this regard, the article outlines the prospects for studying the reception of “children’s texts” using psycholinguistic experiments.

About the author(s) :

Tatiana A. Gridina

Ural State Pedagogical University (Ekaterinburg, Russia)

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3993-5164

Publication Timeline:

Date of receipt: 05.05.2025; date of publication: 30.06.2025

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