Мовно-ілюстративний матеріал як вторинна знакова (мікро)система

The article focuses on the study of illustrations found in linguistic and language teaching literature from a perspective of their operating as a secondary semiotic system. Such systems can comprise a limited inventory of items and belong to a specific author's discourse, where their field of reference is determined by the producent's associations of individual and subjective nature, and therefore generally hidden from the average recipient. Also, they may be related, as their plan de signification, to social communicativefunctional discursive varieties (as those of state politics, ideology, or literary criticism). In both cases, the emergence of such secondary systems results from the conscious intent of the producent. Besides, the secondary semiotic function of language illustrations may emerge independently of the producent, resulting from their interpretations by the recipient. Such unintentional interpretation, too, can be subjective and individual, resulting from the recipient's idiosyncratically finding additional senses in, or imparting them to, illustrations. Or it can emerge as a result of considering linguistic illustrations, as manifesting a nationally and ethnically specific world picture together with its own systems of cognitive models and values, from the viewpoint of another linguistic-cultural community. Lastly, the identification of socio-cultural background of citations can take place due to viewing illustrative material pertaining to one socio-culturally different historical or territorial variant of the same language through the prism of another. Prospects for further research in this direction lie in extensive studies of specific cases of illustrations' secondary semiotic functioning, as well as in the development of the theory and methodology of such studies.