The article is devoted to the scientific heritage of Anatoly Ivanovich Novikov (1938–2003), a prominent Russian linguist and one of the founders of text psycholinguistics. The main points of his theory of sense, which underlies the perception and understanding of the text, are discussed. The theory and the psycholinguistic experiments carried out according to his unique methodology started a new area in the study of text comprehension and found followers and successors. The article gives an overview of the main research directions of the Novikov School, led by his students in Perm and Ufa. The research of Perm linguists is focused on the tasks of text semantics formalisation with the help of modern computer technologies and on the psycholinguistics of translation. The research attention of Ufa linguists is focused on simulating text comprehension processes and constructing an integrative model of understanding different text-types.
Anatoly I. Novikov; psycholinguistics of text; text comprehension modeling; text sense; text content; psycholinguistic experiment; denotative graph; “counter text”.